


The Best Part of Believe is the Lie

by SnitchesAndTalkers



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: 2003, Angst, Falling In Love, First Times, M/M, Mental Health Issues, No band, Smut, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Still set around the Chicago hardcore scene, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-05-18 23:28:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14862329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnitchesAndTalkers/pseuds/SnitchesAndTalkers
Summary: In a world that’s still coming to terms with soulmarks, the dust hasn’t truly settled. Pete falls into the “other,” the category they call “blank,” destined to be nothing more than an also-ran (if he ever runs at all). He can’t pretend he’s made peace with that but he’s casting his net wide to ease the loneliness, collecting bands like some people collect baseball cards as he searches for something that feels like home.At a rock club in a bad part of town, he meets someone.Pete doesn’t have a mark.But he has a bad idea.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_chaotic_panda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_chaotic_panda/gifts).



> Another birthday fic! This time for the absolutely wonderful [the_chaotic_panda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_chaotic_panda/pseuds/the_chaotic_panda)! 
> 
> So, I thought for a long time about what to write for Panda and eventually I came up with this. I've never really touched on soulmark universes before so forgive me if I make any grave errors. This is a tale of finding things the hard way. Panda, I hope you enjoy it on this, the glorious anniversary of your birth!

Pete is eighteen when he begins to question his sexuality.

Okay, maybe not his specifically, just, you know, the whole concept of sexuality in general. It’s not like he’s into dudes, not like he’s laid in bed at night with his hand down the front of his boxers jacking himself half-sore thinking about some dude fucking his ass. No, Pete’s fantasies are all-American, red-blooded and wall-to-wall tits.

But eighteen is when Pete discovers he isn’t necessarily going to get that and it feels pretty unfairly fucking _young_ to have everything he’d assumed was going to happen just… torn away from him like that. Well, life,  it seems, is rarely fair and tits are just half of the population (more if he counts the fat ones) so Pete makes the decision to broaden his horizons.

The first time he fucks a guy, it’s not so bad.

Really though, the first time he fucks a guy, he just gets his dick sucked and that feels basically the same regardless of who owns the mouth. There’s the slightly off-balance sensation of stubble grating against his thighs but if he closes his eyes real tight and thinks _titstitstits_ then, honestly? It’s not half-bad. The dude with a name Pete can’t remember comes in his pants, overeager and fumbling, and Pete figures there’s something to be said for being sleek, tattooed and having a passably attractive cock when it comes to avoiding reciprocation in the world of fellatio.

When they’re done and the nameless guy has shuffled out of the locker room, red-faced and mumbling, Pete touches his bare wrist and considers himself in the mirror. Arms look better with ink, he decides, fingertips drawn to the misshaped scar tissue at the small of his back, and _he_ looks better when he’s not alone.  

So, Pete makes a pact with himself, right there in the locker room. Pete looks himself dead in the eye and promises himself that he will _never_ be alone. It doesn’t matter if they stay for an hour, a night, a year, it doesn’t matter if they revolve through his life like a faceless cavalcade of the happily ever after he doesn’t get to enjoy. It doesn’t matter as long as somebody – _anybody_ – is there.

He puts his fist through the mirror afterwards and watches his reflection explode into shrapnel and blood.

He tells the school nurse he slipped.

~*~

He knows something’s wrong the moment he crosses the threshold of his apartment.

Oh, it’s nothing immediately recognisable, just the stomach-twist sensation that some intangible thing is off, the misguided sense that the furniture has shifted half a foot to the right or someone painted the hallway two shades darker. It’s the underfoot pitch of stepping off land that throws his balance out of tune and has him tripping on feet that don’t quite coordinate.

There’s a suitcase. Zipped tight and propped neatly against the wall, he recognises it from the vacation they took out to California in the summer, pink and scattered with hibiscus flowers. His throat feels too tight and the walls feel too close, everything shifting with the realisation that it’s happening again.  She has a backpack on her shoulder that he thinks is his but he doesn’t ask as she smiles a smile that’s half sympathy, half an uncomfortable wish to be anywhere but the hallway of his apartment.

(Pete very much gets the sense that this is no longer _their_ apartment. It’s his. _His_ apartment. Where _he_ lives. _Alone_.)

“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t sound it. Not in the context of close to two years together. “But I found him.”

The letters at her wrist seem to glitter in the rose-gold glow of the evening light spidering through the open door behind him. He doesn’t bother to close it. There isn’t really any point.

DRM twists across her wrist like a love note. Pete keeps his voice carefully neutral and says, “I thought we were happy?”

“We were,” she smiles, contrite and trying to soothe him. It doesn’t work. “But you’re not…”

“Forever?” he provides. She nods, barely listening. “Yeah. I know. David? Daniel?” he hypothesises into the silence, “Darryl?”

“Donald.” _Donald_. He’s going to be left alone for some dude named fucking _Donald_? The indignity of it is deeply offensive.

“You’ll find your mark,” she shrugs as though she doesn’t know. As though she can’t possibly work out why her boyfriend of two _years_ might have made sure she’s _never_ seen his wrist uncovered.

“I hope you’ll be very happy together,” he offers, sincere in his deepest insincerity as she picks up her suitcase and heads for the door. He hopes for the very antithesis to her happiness. In fact, he hopes _Donald_ has herpes. She doesn’t glance back once as she heads down the hallway which makes him feel at least a little better as he opens his mouth and screams at the open door until his throat cracks with the effort. “You goddamn fucking _whore_!”

It doesn’t make him feel any better but then he supposes, as he slams the door closed, that he never really expected it to. He calls Chris, fake-breezy and casually cool as he systematically smashes each framed picture of them around the apartment. He thinks of each muted crash of glass (under a dishcloth, it’s not like he wants Chris to hear, Jesus fucking _Christ_ ) as punctuation, perfectly underscored parodies of periods and commas and semicolons delivered with a fist that may or may not be streaking the dishcloth pink.

“Yeah, man,” there goes the picture from the Ferris wheel, “I just had to get out, you know?” that would be the one from Lake Tahoe, “So I’m kinda at a loose end and I just wondered,” fuck _you_ mom and dad’s silver wedding anniversary dinner, “if maybe we had any plans tonight?”

Fuck, he took a lot of pictures. He clenches and unclenches his fist a little; there’s a satisfying bloom of punch-drunk bruises glowing under the blood-raw scrape of his knuckles. Blood tracks crimson trails all the way down the back of his hands to smudge amongst the ink on his arms, to paint it slick and shining and new-tattoo fresh. He takes a deep breath and waits for Chris to answer.

“She found him?” Chris says without needing to guess. Pete nods without Chris needing to see. “Fucking sucks. Yeah dude, we’ll figure something out.”

“I don’t want to be a blank,” Pete mutters. It’s the first time he’s said it out loud and the last time he wants to feel this fucking vulnerable and exposed, like someone has stripped away skin and tissue and left nothing but raw nerve endings. “It’s – it’s gonna keep happening, isn’t it? Like, this is it. For me, anyway. Just – just waiting on everyone to leave.”

“It’ll be fine,” Chris says, as though that’s reassuring. For all Pete knows, he’s the only blank Chris has ever met. It’s not something anyone talks about, not something _he_ talks about but he’s known Chris basically his whole life and it seemed pointless to hold back when he was eighteen and furious at everything around him. “You know that, right?”

Pete shakes out another pill – it’s the first thing they give to people like him, medicate to take the edge off. No one seems to say anything about overdose being the most common form of suicide amongst blanks. It’s not hard to make the connection.

“Yeah,” Pete swallows, a trace of chemical bitterness at the back of his tongue to match the flash flood of bitterness in his chest. “I guess.”

“Are you okay?” Chris asks, like he isn’t sure if Pete is self-medicated or manic. Pete eyes the pill bottle on the counter.

“Fine.” He’s caught in that halfway between “asshole” and “vindicated” because whilst he’s absolutely the former he just has to wave his wrist in Chris’s face to remind him that he’s also definitely the latter. “Are we going out or are you gonna let me drink alone?”

“I hear that’s dangerous,” Chris sighs like he isn’t smiling.

“Can’t have that.”

~*~

Chris brings Kate and Kate brings some chick named Dale and Pete’s kind of into the way she’s looking at him across the bar. As long as he tries _really_ hard not to think about moaning his mom’s name. It matters less and less the more cheap beer and expensive shots he feeds straight into his system. The good thing about not eating — and no one wants to talk about this — is that it makes getting trashed so much more efficient.

Dale seems like a nice girl, she really does. She’s got these huge dark eyes and pretty lips. She’s espousing the relative feminist virtues of Plath over Dickinson and every time she leans in to touch his chest he can see straight down her shirt. She’s not wearing a bra. He’s aware of his eyes bugging out of his head slightly each time she does it but there’s enough alcohol burning up his bloodstream that he doesn’t care that it’s obvious.

“You’re in a band?” she’s shouting over the music that’s just the right side too loud, something he recognises but doesn’t, bass heavy and thrashy and catching on the edges of his subconscious as he tries to place it. He ducks his head so she’s breathing into his ear, hot and damp, a little sticky-sweet with the smell of rum. She’s draped across his lap like a stripper. Well, mostly. The part of his lap that isn’t following his ass over the edge of the bar stool he’s trying hard not to slide off.

“I’m in a lot of bands,” he shrugs, grinning wide enough that his face hurts, his hand easing under that pretty little skirt she’s wearing. His thumb runs lightly over the damp cotton between her thighs and she spreads her legs. His cock twitches. “You should come along and see us sometime. I can get you backstage,” his fingers trace her spine right the way down to the pair of butterfly wings he’s seen peeking between her short skirt and cropped shirt as they both pretend she needs the second date to ride his dick, “get to know you a little better.”

Her lips find his throat, that tender little spot that lingers just beneath his ear, caught between the fold of his hoodie and the fall of his hair. He shivers, eyes closed for a moment as her hand finds his and he wonders if it can be this easy, if he’s going to get away with a smooth shift from one to the other…

She pushes up his sleeve, fingertips scoring softly against the nerve-sharp delicacy of his inner wrist. She pulls away, eyes drifting down with feigned casual disinterest, her thumb tracing the fat blue vein. He forgot his cuff — the scene might have thrown up a lot of shitty things but wristbands definitely help people like him. When he remembers it anyway. His guts drop three stories through the floor as his heart picks up and tries to crawl into his throat. She jerks back, too fast to be subtle, too choppy to be anything but horror as she drops his hand, slithers off his knee and almost crashes to her ass. He’d laugh if she did. She’d fucking deserve it.

“Oh.” She sounds surprised and that curls something sharp and acidic in Pete’s throat. “You’re – ”

“Yeah.” He yanks down his sleeve and knocks back whatever the fuck is in the glass next to him. It burns like it’s something strong, neat and unadvisable and that’s all that really matters at this point. If he’s going home alone, he’s going home wasted. “Is that gonna be a problem? I mean, I don’t remember asking you to marry me?”

It aches that so many people still give a shit. It’s not like anyone really holds out exclusively for their mark outside of those weird religious cults. Dating is _fine_ , but dating a blank — for some at least — is still kind of taboo.

She blushes and looks away, a hand raised casually to pull through her hair. Black twists delicately across the pale of her skin, _SLK_ , right there, just inside her wrist. He doesn’t know why it makes him irrationally angry that someone out there sharing two of his initials is going to be granted happiness, like shared letters give him a link to whoever they are. He supposes that’s why it’s irrational.

“No, it’s totally cool,” she’s trying too hard now and Pete just wants to leave, wants to get away from her and crawl into his head. He wants to fall onto the stage and scream every injustice out to a crowd while he touches hands like he’s granting absolution. “I just thought – ”

“You think you’re better than me.” It’s not even an accusation, not anymore. He’s had six years to get used to it, it’s just a statement of fact. He’s dirtied without being marked. “That’s fine.”

“Pete, wait.” She tries to pull him back, her hand closing around _that_ wrist. He yanks free and spins on his seat, he needs to leave, to put some distance between them before he yells something he’ll regret (or most likely won’t) in the morning.

“Yeah, nice talking to you, you fucking _bitch_ ,” he staggers from the stool and falters a step, slamming into the bar hard enough that he knows his ribs will be bruised in the morning. Ribs, knuckles, all he needs is a black eye and a bust lip. Right on cue, the ground pitches up to meet him as he stumble-slips on feet that don’t feel attached to his legs, palms and knees rubbed raw on rough concrete and lip bursting, wet and coppery, against the footrest of the stool. “Shit fuck…”

No one is around to help him stand.

The bathroom is cold and he has no real idea how he got there. A single, flickering overhead striplight barely illuminates the room, which goes a long way to disguising whatever filth Pete is kneeling in as he coughs and splutters over the bowl. There’s a fug of warm piss and chilled tiles and he tries not to think about the times he’s made his way into dozen different stalls just like this in a dozen different bars with a dozen different dudes. _Titstitstits._

It’s fine.

Really, it’s okay. _He’s_ okay.

His stomach cramps painfully on another dry heave. The first few mouthfuls didn’t taste so bad, sweetened with whatever he’s spent the night knocking back. But then it gave way to something thick and bitter and now it’s just the occasional trickle of bile forcing its way up to stain the bowl yellow and sour. In honesty, he’s probably dragging it out at this stage as an excuse not to head back into the body of the club.

The music swells as the door swings open, footsteps moving behind him instead of to the urinals at his left. He coughs, clears his throat and swipes the back of his hand over his mouth when he feels someone stop behind him.

“Occupied, dude,” he calls, not turning from the toilet in front of him.

“Pete?” This time he does twist his head, neck stiffening painfully as he scowls over his shoulder. If it’s an Arma fan hassling him while he throws up his insides, he’s going to be severely fucking pissed. “Chris said you were in here — you okay?”

Joe blinks at him and Pete scrubs at his lip — thick, oddly numb and flavoured like bass strings and salt — with the sleeve of his hoodie. Blood smudges across the back of his hand and the split throbs a little in protest.

“Fuck, man,” he relaxes, pivoting onto his ass, knees drawn up as he blinks up blearily at Joe. His head hurts, the throb of it pounding with the shitty metal music he can hear through the bathroom door. “You make a habit of sneaking up on dudes in restrooms?”

“Only you.” Joe flutters his eyelashes ridiculously and moves to the urinals. Pete stares at a spot on the ceiling as Joe takes a piss, shakes and washes his hands in a sink that probably leaves them dirtier than they were from touching his dick. The way Joe hums, tuneless and offensive, the way he trails his fingertips through his hair and looks at Pete in the mirror, suggests he has no idea what just happened. “You coming back out?”

“Is that chick still here with Kate?” he asks, Converse braced to the opposite side of the stall as he pushes hard, lifts his ass from the floor and holds it there for a moment. He feels almost sober and he’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. There’s a restless burning in his veins and he can’t go home yet.

“Dunno,” Joe shrugs, definitely more than halfway to disinterested in Pete’s failed hook-ups. “But I’ll buy you a drink if you get up off the fucking floor, dude. God only knows what the fuck you’re sitting on…”

For a guy that always smells of stale pizza, Joe sure is good at faking like he’s got a lot of fancy standards. Pete hauls himself upright anyway, only swaying a little as he follows Joe back into the belly of the club, as the music twists and pounds and itches through his veins like a disease. He nods his head along to the beat and shuffles to the bar, hood drawn up and cheeks smudged with eyeliner. Dale is long gone but Chris and Kate are still there along with Andy, Charlie and some dude Pete thinks might be called Aaron or AJ or something.

There’s a drink pushed into his hand, sticky-sweet over the acrid taste of vomit still kind of lingering on his tongue. Fresh orange juice and something bitter – vodka maybe – not like it matters exactly what it is as long as he gets the buzz going again. There’s an orange pill bottle in his bathroom cabinet that almost matches the contents of his glass, antipsychotics he hasn’t taken in too long. He’s not going to think about that though because he’s here, with his friends and everyone seems at least mostly happy.

The pack breaks, a twist and shift of crammed-close bodies as Joe leads someone over, some awkward looking dude in a jean jacket and a Bowie shirt. Someone who can’t seem to work out if he wants to hide behind his collar, his hair or the low-slung peak of his trucker hat as Joe shoves him into the rough circle they’ve formed by the bar.

“Guys, this is the dude I was telling you about,” Joe is sweetly close to drunk in that way Joe always gets. Smokey-eyed and charming whereas Pete gets brittle and abrasive. “This – this is fucking Patrick.”

 _Fucking Patrick_ ducks his head as he looks up, peering around the group from behind dirty blonde and thick lenses. Pete honestly doesn’t remember Joe telling anyone about anything, much less chubby little dudes in Buddy Holly glasses. He’s handing out these shy, nervous smiles like he thinks someone is going to punch him in the face if he doesn’t. He gets to Pete and his eyes widen, just a little, just enough for Pete to recognise the look that says he might not have to go home alone after all. Wolf-sharp smile and stretched hand for Patrick to shake, Pete leans in as Patrick reaches forward to take it, jean jacket sliding up right at his wrist.

It calls him out like smack talk across parking lots scented with gasoline fumes and flavoured with MD 20/20. Four letters carved across Patrick’s skin; a literal, actual, honest to God fucking _brand._

_PLKW._

He jerks his hand back before they can touch, shoves it down into his pocket as everyone stares and Patrick mumbles something hot and embarrassed, eyes fluttering to the floor as his cheeks stain pink in the low light. It’s awkward for a moment until someone decides Pete’s controlled the crowd enough for one night and a joke is cracked. Patrick stares at him but pretends he doesn’t, lip bitten bruised. He gives in when Joe shoves a drink into his hand and knocks it back with a grimace; the first of many ill-advised drinks from people that should know better. He gets prettier as he wanders into wasted, Pete decides. Like, as far as dudes go, he’s almost cute with his honey blonde frame of hair, with his thick glasses and full, Botticelli lips that Pete can totally imagine wrapped around his cock.

Patrick also gets complacent as he gets drunk.

It’s almost too easy for Pete to ease his wallet – sensible, plain brown leather, not like Pete’s Velcro-taped Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vinyl monstrosity – from the pocket of his jacket while he talks earnestly to Charlie about some finer point of the song playing. It’s almost ridiculous how simple it is to thumb out his driver’s licence – fuck, Pete’s never seen a licence picture look more like a mugshot – and check his full name. _Patrick Martin Stumph._  Wow. Someone’s parents were _not_ paying attention.

Pete fumbles on the floor for a moment, faking like he’s scrabbling for something before straightening, wallet held aloft like a trophy; a dubious reward for a terrible decision, “Anyone drop this?”

“Shit,” Patrick pats his pocket then holds out his hand with a sheepish smile. Pete grins back, wide and charming. “Yeah, thanks man.”

“No problem,” Pete shrugs as Patrick shoves the wallet back into his jacket without a second thought, announcing loudly to no one in particular, “gotta take a piss…”

In the bathroom stall once more, he sits on the closed seat and feels his stomach clench and grab with nerves. There’s an uncapped sharpie in his hand, the chemical-bright sharpness of ethanol stinging his nostrils as it hovers, millimetres above his skin. There’s a blank patch above his pulse point, the one place that the reputable tattoo artists won’t touch. Because there’s always a chance, always a _possibility_ that a mark might appear. If someone loses their match too young, if something goes wrong, that’s when the blanks come into their own.

The mop-ups.

The almost-rans.

The honourable mentions.

If he does this, if he commits to what he plans to do, there’s no going back. What he’s doing is illegal. It’s a federal offence and he could go to fucking jail for it. What he’s doing is morally reprehensible. He’ll be lying to Patrick about his fucking _soulmark_ , there are few things society deems worse. He finds the moral implications easier to brush to the side than the legal ones. What’s wrong with a little ambiguity between not-quite-soulmates? How likely is it that he’s ever going to meet anyone else with PLKW stained across their wrist?

This feels like fate.

Slowly, he lowers the nib to his skin, eyes fixed on black bleeding over gold as he scratches it across his veins, tongue poking from the corner of his mouth in concentration. Once it’s done, he takes a deep breath, blowing cool air over wet ink to dry it out and stop it smudging. He needs to make sure he doesn’t sweat too much. More than that, he needs to make sure he doesn’t _think_ too much.

He stands and flushes like everything is normal, unlocks the door and shuffles to the sinks, checking his eyes for any trace of the lie he’s about to commit. There’s nothing, the Pete in the mirror stares back impassively, the blood on his lip already dried to a rust-stained crust. He’s Alice through the looking glass, desperately trying to prove he’s not just part of the Red King’s dream. He shoves up the cuff of his hoodie to inspect his handiwork once more, to look at the way the letters swirl beneath his actual tattoos.

_PMS._

He arranges his face into his best, most charming smile as he considers himself in the mirror. He saw the look Patrick gave him when their eyes first met, it’s not like he doesn’t know how he looks. He knows he’s a good-looking son of a bitch, he sees it reflected in the looks he gets, in the way people cluster just a little too closely. He squares his shoulders, shoves open the door and makes his way across the club, sliding onto the stool next to Patrick.

Patrick glances at him from the corner of his eye, pivoting on his seat as Pete grins, big and friendly and slouching forward across the bar like he’s stretching out stiff shoulders. His hoodie cuff rides up just how he wants it to, a promising peek of Patrick’s initials slipping out temptingly.

Next to him, Patrick stiffens, eyes locked on Pete’s wrist as Pete clears his throat, “So, Patrick. Tell me about yourself.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, what do we think so far? 
> 
> Comments and kudos are wonderful or you can find me on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers
> 
> I hope I'll see you back next Wednesday for the next chapter :)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pete faces the realities of split-second bad decisions...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back one and all! I hope you guys enjoyed the first chapter last week, I'm a sucker for a bit of moral ambiguity. I hope you enjoy what I have planned for this week...

 They’re in the back seat of a cab, somewhere between the bar and an apartment Patrick promises him isn’t far away. It looks suspiciously like they’re heading for Englewood, a development that pleases Pete not at all. The flicker-glow of the numbers on the dashboard inform him — blurred enough to let him know he’s nicely buzzed — that it’s close to two in the morning. Patrick strokes his hair and mumbles something around a slurred giggle and Pete is really starting to get into him.

“You’re cute,” Patrick hiccups on a breath thick with booze. “Like — way cuter than, uh, than me. This mark thing is — it’s fucking _rad.”_

Pete laughs along while his head spins, an ice cream sundae swirl of streetlights, white teeth and ink stained to his skin. He kisses Patrick hungrydesperatedirty, licking into the taste of beer and the sudden coppery brightness from the split on his lip, freshly opened under questing tongues. Sideburns scrub under his palms, rough, just like the kiss. Patrick smells of fucking sunshine and he’s looking at Pete as though he’s already most of the way in love. Pete could get high on it, he’s sure of it.

They draw up outside of a building like a thousand more around the city, sharp angles of beige bricks and blinking-eye undraped windows that stare down at the street below. They scrabble the fare up between them, sweaty bills and metallic-tanged change stuffed through the window before they tumble onto the sidewalk. Patrick is already sweating, salt-sharp jewels beading along his temples just below the line of his hat, glowing slick against his throat as he swallows, adam’s apple bobbing. Pete tastes, tongue dragging slow and sure along the blood-hot line of him.

Patrick whines and fiddles with the security code. Red light — red light — green light. Pete’s halfway to a metaphor. They stagger into the hallway, tangling over one another, messy arms and legs and the thump of the wall to his spine gusting every bit of air from his lungs. Pete gasps and groans and slides his thigh between Patrick’s, lets him thrust against it as he sinks his nails into the plush give of Patrick’s ass.

“Can I blow you?” The hand on his belt buckle makes it hard to think, logic dragging through fogged-thick lust (is it gay to get hard from the grind of a warm, male body against his cock?).

“No.” He shakes his head. Patrick’s eyes widen — kicked puppy hurt— and Pete stutters clarification around the salt-velvet tag of Patrick’s earlobe, words hissed hot and sticky and dewing against his skin. “I mean yeah. _Fuck_ yeah. But like — inside, yeah?”

“Inside?” Patrick gently drifts cross-eyed as he stares at Pete’s bleeding lip for a moment, hiccuping a giggle that smells of fruit juice and half-hazed alcohol. Pete grazes his knuckles the length of Patrick’s cock, grinning predator-wide as he shudders a moan. “Right. Yeah.”

They stumble-trip their way up the stairs and down a hallway, overhead light pooling shadows in doorways. 34… 36… 38… Scuffed black numbers screwed to scuffed grey doors, disturbingly reminiscent of Soviet-era Russia in depressingly utilitarian shades of grey and beige.

44.

Patrick works his keys from his pocket and immediately drops them, huffing a groan as he stoops to snag them with trembling hands. Pete slides down Patrick’s body before he can, half trying to be a master of seduction and half losing most of his motor function in one neuron-frying burst of dying brain cells and alcohol poisoning. He has a private theory that the blowjob he gets in return increases vastly in quality if the guy giving it has already shot his load.

“ _Pete_ ,” Patrick whines, back arched to the door as he fists frantic fingers into Pete’s hair. He draws the word out and gives it a dozen syllables, each of them weighted and heady with salacious intent. “Oh, God.”

Between the two of them, with fingers that feel fat with numbed-nerve rebellion, they work open Patrick’s jeans and shove down his shorts, a tangled mess of denim and cotton that snags halfway to his knees. His thighs are pale, soft-skinned marble dusted with red-gold hair that shifts, coarse and rough, under the drag of Pete’s palms. Patrick’s cock, flushed stiff and pink and wet-tipped, brushes against Pete’s cheek as he pushes a sloppy kiss to the soft curve of Patrick’s hip.

“Thought I was — was gonna blow _you_?” Patrick bites his lip, white teeth sinking into the soft, pink curve of it. He smells musky, fresh sweat and leaking dick hot in Pete’s nose as he smiles around the grit of his teeth and takes the lust-gorged head of Patrick’s prick into his mouth. “Oh _fuck_ , no, we’ll do this… This is good…”

A burst of bitter streaks Pete’s tongue, bleach-bright and salted, his nose wrinkling in a grimace tucked away behind the fall of his bangs into his eyes. Patrick writhes against the door, pinned by Pete’s hands to his hips, the brush of creased cotton over soft stomach pushing to his forehead on each slide down the heated length of Patrick’s dick. Pete is out of his body, out of his mind and someplace else as he curls his tongue around the ridged cap of Patrick’s cock then pulls off, slick and wet.

“ _Don’t_ come in my mouth,” he warns and Patrick nods, bitten lip and flushed frantic, like he’d agree to call down the stars around them if Pete says the word. There’s a thumb hooked gently over Pete’s ear, the other running the curve of his jaw as he maps him out, frontier fresh, tracing each new plane like a pioneer. _PLKW_ taunts Pete with each roll of Patrick’s wrist, each draw back of denim from pale skin an accusation. It’s not _his_ claim to make.

Eyes closed and lips parted, Pete curls his hand around the throbbing base of Patrick’s cock, mouth working the couple of inches that crest from the closed clasp of his fist. He works fast, sucking hard as Patrick whimpers a litany of unformed filth and hissed curses through teeth bitten sharp around the swollen curve of his lower lip. Mouth meeting fist meeting hips, they rock together, a rhythm of rolling thrusts and the bob of Pete’s head over that pale-as-cream lap.

Pre-come stains the back of Pete’s mouth, a steady dripdripdrip from the tender tip of Patrick’s gorged thick cock. Pete’s thumb traces blown-blunt veins to the copper-haired tuck of Patrick’s balls, the pad pushing hard to the crease of Patrick’s perineum.

“Oh!” Patrick gasps, hands tight in Pete’s hair, enough to chase skitter-shock sensation across his scalp as Patrick’s thighs shake and his eyes roll back.

It’s all over within half a minute.

_Bitterstickyhot_. Come streaks across his lips as Patrick grunts in the same second he slumps, wedged between Pete and the door. He cries out — guttural, animal noise torn from his wet, pink mouth — hips twitching and pale pearl slicking hot across Pete’s lips, his chin, streaking glitter-spun as Patrick collapses by degrees, buckling and folding, origami paper hearts in fifth period English class. His come splashes, shining, down the black of Pete’s hoodie and pooling, finally, on the thigh of his jeans. Pete tries not to gag — good impressions, best behaviour and holiday manners — and drags his sleeve over his tongue, scraping away the taste with dried blood and dirty cotton.

“Oh,” Patrick repeats, soft and vague and spoken to the puddle of cooling come halfway down Pete’s thigh. “I — I didn’t like, come in your mouth, right?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pete says, sharp with irritation until he realises, confused, that he sort of means it. He can hardly taste it, truth told, the bitter burn of vodka still dulling his senses as he leans in and kisses Patrick, wet and messy. Tongues more than lips and nails raking ruby lines of desperation under their shirts as Patrick tries, once again, for his keys.

Pete is hard enough to burst in his jeans, hard enough to fucking _die_ from the pressure backing up low between his hips as he ruts his cock against the softening hang of Patrick’s. Patrick whines like a love song and grabs for Pete’s hand, licking hard over his wrist, sucking bruises to the loop and swirl of his inked-lie initials as he fumbles one-handed with the keyhole above his head.

The door crashes inward and they roll with it, falling and thumping to the carpet that hovers somewhere between grey and beige in the eerie half-light caste of some distant streetlight. Patrick lands face down and winded — pale ass framed by the hem of his denim jacket and the top of his jeans — deliciously plump and inviting. From this angle, long hair curled over his collar, he could be Patricia rather than Patrick. Pete loses the thought in a burst of uncontrollable, inappropriate giggles.

“Your _ass_ ,” he wheezes, as Patrick blinks up at him, cheek smeared to the carpet. “Dude… you’re — you’re so fuckin’ _white_.”

“Shut up,” Patrick manages to remove one of the syllables but Pete doesn’t know how, his giggles intensifying, clawing up his throat as Patrick struggles upright and wriggles to straddle his crotch. “ _Shhh_ ,” he slurs, a finger pushed to Pete’s lips as he whisper-shouts around helpless laughter of his own, kicking the door closed with an unsteady lurch of his sneaker. “Shhh, or I — I won’t fuckin’... what’ssit called again?”

Pete’s lungs stutter, suddenly sober as Patrick’s hand brushes warmth over his throbbing, aching cock. They fall still and silent, all Pete can hear is the pulsing thrum of his wet, messy heart pounding against his eardrums. Can it mark them? Will there be bruises in the shape of his pulse in the morning when he’s sober and the high has worn away?

Pete doesn’t blink, won’t think, just says, “Blow me.”

“Blow you.” Patrick nods, vague and messy. “Yeah. Wanna do that.”

Pupils blown wide open and lush lip bitten once more, Patrick fumbles with zipper and button until Pete’s cock is free. It stands between them, stiff and sticky-tipped and flushed blood-dark, each nerve alight to the lightest suggestion of touch. Pete stares at Patrick’s pretty mouth — red and wet and wanting — and thinks he barely needs it, he could come right now from nothing more than the suggestion of hot breath against his prick, the feather of a warm tongue to the nerve-sharp crown of it.

The city lights glow like firefly sirens through the uncurtained window, his fingertips twisting hot into the carpet under his hands. A butterfly-wing flutter of a kiss is the only tease Patrick gives, the flirt of plush-plump lips pushed pouted and soft to the slippery-leak head of his cock.  The slick slide of Patrick’s tongue over his lips echoes around the room as he leans down, hot breath — hot, _damp_ breath — like a caress as he pauses, breathes and then

And then.

Patrick takes him in, no teasing, no preamble, just the slick, wet grasp of that hot, tight mouth around the straining, blood-gorged length of Pete’s cock. Chicks don’t suck dick like this, Pete thinks absently, at least not the ones he’s been with. It’s all tease and display with them, not hungry, desperate mouths on tender, greedy cocks. Patrick is quick and purposeful, bobbing his head as he twists the base in the elegant length of pale fingers. Musician’s hands, Pete realises, a symphony conducted between his legs.

Patrick’s mouth — his hot, wet, suction-driven mouth — is suddenly absent from the hot, wet, suction- _wanting_ length of Pete’s cock. He would like to object — there are definite objections ricocheting around his skull — but instead he stutters a gasping, pitiful little noise as Patrick dips his head and sucks the rounded swell of one of Pete’s balls into his mouth.

“Oh, God,” he manages to conjure up from somewhere, some long-forgotten and uncatalogued synapse that rejoins the party just in time for Patrick’s to switch sides, damp tongue slicking through coarse hair. “Oh my fucking _God_.”

“I like this,” Patrick tells Pete’s bartskull tattoo before he sucks down his cock like he’s starving for the taste. Pete’s stomach hitches, groin tightens, whole body short circuiting somewhere between snipped wires and burnt out circuit boards. A tiny part of Pete likes it too. The part that, he assumes, controls the orgasms.

Pete twists his hips, a paradigm of desire laid out on a stranger’s floor. His hands sink into the spun silk of Patrick’s hair, his hat knocked askew, knocked aside, knocked somewhere Pete doesn’t care to look for it as, for the first time, he opens his eyes to watch. Male lips wrapped around his male prick, stubble and sideburns and the firm line of a masculine jaw. Pete’s never taken a moment to appreciate how delicious it is, how it sparks an illicit little frisson of pleasure to knot low in his groin. Patrick grins, spit-sticky and fuck-flushed, then takes him, clumsy, soft but oh so eager, to the back of his throat.

Pete would curse, he knows he would, if Patrick’s mouth hadn’t just robbed him of any and all vocabulary, if he wasn’t reduced to writhing limbs and twitching need. Instead he whines, thin and desperate in the back of his throat, fucking his hips up as he draws closer, a rocket fuel comet trail of blazing heat, unstoppable, uncontrollable, coiled thick and tight. He tastes salt, sees stars and feels the first pulsing throb pounding out and endlessly out from the base of his cock as he starts to come.

It cripples him, a thermite explosion of need that sucks in all of the oxygen in the room to burn up brighter, more beautiful than anything else around them. Each muscle is drawn taut and tense, each aching throb of unfulfilled want made flesh and wanting in the glorious wet heat of Patrick’s indescribable, irrefutable mouth. The world is a photograph with the colours inverted, high resolution overexposure burning bright in the velvet darkness of suddenly slammed closed eyes.

He thinks he cries out, something warm and ragged, a mangled approximation of Patrick’s name that burns his throat. He sinks his nails deeper into the worn-down pile of the carpet that’s scorching friction burn into his ass and pulses hotwetdesperate down Patrick’s eager throat, dragging him closer with a handful of fuck-trashed hair.

Spent, he collapses back and allows their breathing to orchestrate the awkwardness of the comedown.

Head dropped and eyes hidden behind the fall of honey-gold hair, Patrick’s shoulders heave as he braces a pale hand to the gilt-gold of Pete’s hip. Pete’s fingers are still twisted, still knotted, into the softness of Patrick’s hair, thumb scoring the curve of his cheekbone as his chest contracts and expands with not-enough-air desperation. They stay, Pete’s softening cock falling slick and sticky against his thigh, his shirt rucked up and more of his ink laid out on display, until their breathing calms.

Patrick looks up.

He’s a mess of trashed hair and fucked-raw lips swollen red and slashed across the flushed pink of his face. He blinks, glasses knocked askew, eyes unfocused and messy as he reaches to bring their wrists together, admiring the way the letters look next to one another.

“Peter,” he whispers, soft as breaking hearts. “ _Pete_. It’s funny, I always thought you’d be a Philip.”

Pete is learning that Patrick is terrible at knowing the right thing to say.

“I should get going,” he says, like the kid didn’t suck his cock so recently that his come will still linger, musky and salted, coating his tongue.  Pete is awful at filling silences with words everyone wants to hear but panic is rising in his gut. Claustrophobic and encompassing, the whirl of a hurricane around him while he flounders at the centre.

“Stay?” Patrick murmurs, half hopeful, half ready for rejection. “I know I’m — I’m not what you expected. But, like,” he glances down at their wrists, Pete yanks down his sleeve rather than watch the glow in Patrick’s eyes, “but you can stay, you know?”

It’s a shitty studio apartment, the sofa bed rolled out and unmade in the corner under a host of posters — Pete sees Prince, Bowie, Coltrane, a haphazard, puzzle piece mash of colour and faces — and scattered with clothes he’s pretty sure aren’t clean.  Now that the orgasm has blown away some of the alcohol, he sees the apartment for what it is — cracked, stained, imperfect. Patrick seems the same and Pete isn’t sure he’s ready for this after all. Excuses thunder through him — work in the morning, worried roommates, an early class — but then Patrick dulls above him, all of that sunshine from the cab ride leaching out of him as he slumps a little. He _knows_ that look.

Pete can’t be that guy.

Not right now.

He nods, puppet-string jerks of his chin as he struggles to sit under the press of Patrick’s bare ass to his knees. Lips meet his, warm, salt-sweat stinging sharp into the cut on his lip. Patrick kisses dark and desperate, touch-starved and hungry as he wrestles Pete out of his hoodie. If Pete were a better person he’d just leave, short-term pain for the long-term benefit (to Patrick at least) of going about his life without Pete in it. He has a mark, he’ll find them someday.

Instead, he lets Patrick lead him to the bed as if there’s a possibility of getting lost in a room where he can stretch out a hand and touch the bed, the fold out table and the tiny countertop masquerading as a kitchen without taking a step. Shirts shucked and jeans kicked aside, they curl together under sheets that smell of warm body and cheap deodorant. It smells like Patrick has replaced doing laundry with Febreze. That seems like a smart move to Pete.

Ying-yang curved, Pete’s chest to Patrick’s bare back. He ghosts kisses to golden freckles that cling like reverse-shaded stars to the pale stretch of Patrick’s shoulders. Fingers lace with his, biting possession into his knuckles as Patrick pulls Pete’s hand up, nose pressed to the threaded blue of veins stretched with delicate skin. He kisses each letter in turn, lips tracing the loop and flow of the P, the M and the S, a sharp nip delivered as punctuation.

Sleep takes Patrick quickly, ribs rising and falling with rhythmic regularity as Pete stares at the geometric kaleidoscope patterns of passing headlights on the ceiling. He watches the hours tick by on Patrick’s alarm clock, sobriety snapping at his heels to leave him sore and bloodied in a stranger’s bed, initials traced on his arm in sharpie and tucked to flushed pink lips. Patrick smiles in his sleep, a kiss nudged to Pete’s pulse point every time he stirs. Pete stiffens, spine straight and arms locked tense with the urge to pull back each time, to rush from the room on silent soles and never look back.

Destructive thoughts crawl over him, burning ant bites that worm into tender places and tickle irritation into his skin until he’s rubbed-raw itchy with it. He lies still even though he hums with adrenaline, bruises throbbing and head pounding until he drifts away as dawn streaks the room a hundred shades of rose-hued gold.

He wakes, startled and tip-turned with confusion, floundering in a bed he doesn’t recognise and facing a wall that isn’t familiar. He’s not sure what time it is but he knows there haven’t been enough hours between dozing off and jolting into wakefulness for it to count as proper rest. Ziggy Stardust stares back, streaked red, yellow and blue and a pale arm tightens, an anchor around his waist.

Patrick.

His dehydrated, abused, semi-insane brain provides the name like an answer before it’s even fully finished framing the question. Blue eyes and glasses knocked askew, a hot mouth around Pete’s hard cock. He twists his arm and stares down at the letters that made so much sense in a grimy bathroom stall with a drumbeat replacing his pulse. They’re concerningly pale now, rubbed raw by Patrick’s greedy mouth, greying and fading, untruths on display as he twists to tuck his hand under the pillow so Patrick can’t see. His therapist always said he was a fantasist.

“Good morning,” Patrick breathes against his neck. He doesn’t add _soulmate_ , but Pete hears it like an accusation caught at the back of a throat that knows the taste of his cock. He stays still and thinks about feigning sleep but Patrick is leaning over him, propped on an elbow and touching his face like four shitty letters scrawled on his wrist give him the right.

There’s not enough air in the room to sustain Pete and his imminent anxiety attack.

The apartment is even more depressing in daylight. Cracks like root systems mark the path of the tenants that marched before Patrick; faded paint and chipped plaster that he’s tried to cover with posters and prints. There’s a guitar in the corner, probably worth more than the bed, the couch and the shitty portable TV put together which is really saying something since it looks like a crappy knock-off. It has a broken string and Pete finds that one, barely relevant detail impossibly sad.

He rolls over, panic bursting bitter as uncoated pills on his tongue when he sees the faint grey tint around Patrick’s plump, pink lips. He tucks his wrist a little more tightly out of view. Patrick grins, city-wide and shining, a flush creeping pink and pretty over pale skin until it touches his hairline.

“Hey.” Pete’s throat cracks on the word, fucked-raw and scraped hoarse from shouting, abused by the flame-flow of liquor. The rest of him hasn’t fared much better, bruises mixed with ink to stain him purple and green amongst the lines of black and grey. Patrick touches the largest, the one that blooms bright and bold across his ribs and Pete almost can’t remember how it happened.

That warm hand slides up, blazing a trail of rough skin on a large palm — Pete wants to shy away but forces himself to stay still — under the pillow, fingers teasing over his wrist then lacing with his own. He tries to tug Pete’s hand free — probably to press another fucking kiss to the comically fake mark on his wrist, the fucking idiot. Pete resists. Patrick gives in after a second or two and leaves their clasped hands tucked beneath the pillow.

“You want some breakfast?” he offers, eyes fuck-drunk and soft, the epitome of puppy dog. Pete wants to hate him. Maybe he does. “I don’t have any cereal or anything but there’s like, coffee? You like it black?”

Pete should lie. A good person would lie, drink the fucking coffee and make polite small talk.

“No,” he snaps, yanking his hand free and itching with the reminder that he’s _not_ a good person. “I don’t like that.”

 

Patrick blinks, no doubt wondering if Pete means the coffee, the hand-holding or Patrick himself. There’s a cruel twist in Pete’s gut that makes him want to tell Patrick he means all three.

“That’s cool, we can go out for something,” Patrick offers, gamely attempting to reclaim some of that stolen, buzzed-high closeness from the night before. All Pete can recall is scrabbling through two mostly empty wallets for enough small change to pay an irritated cab driver. Go out _where_ exactly? Patrick must know, must see it etched into the crease of Pete’s scowl as he struggles to sit and reaches for his glasses, his voice soft. “I can afford coffee and a danish, you know.”

Looking at the apartment (room, it’s just a fucking _room_ ), Pete sincerely doubts that.

“How old are you?” he asks, suddenly suspicious of the way the light plays across the planes of Patrick’s face. He looked older last night, caught in club lighting with his hat and his glasses. Pete isn’t ready to deal with a statutory rape charge on top of everything else.

“Nineteen,” Patrick looks surprised and a little pissed off, “why?”

Of course he’s over eighteen, he has a fucking mark. The pulse and pound of a migraine is too much to think around right now.

“Where’s your bathroom?” Pete snaps, rather than push anything any further. The atmosphere is already thick with embarrassment and irritation. Why couldn’t the _one_ person in fucking Chicago dressed up in Pete’s initials like a cheap suit at least have the courtesy to be a goddamn _girl_? Patrick draws his knees to his chest, his shield against the unending onslaught of Pete’s hungover assholery. “Oh fuck, it’s not _shared_ is it?”

“No, it’s just through there,” Patrick whispers to the mattress and nods at the door next to the tiny kitchen that isn’t really a kitchen so much as two feet of countertop, a hot plate, a sink and a comically miniscule refrigerator. Pete’s chest feels uncomfortably tight — this is the morning after the kid met his soulmate, his other half, the person designed to complete him and Pete is going out of his way to ruin it. “Knock yourself out.”

Pete trips over a stack of haphazardly piled vinyl on the way and curses with enough misplaced aggression to make Patrick flinch.

In the bathroom, he stares down at his wrist. It looks a lot worse in the harsh, unforgiving glow of an uncovered overhead fluorescent bulb, but really — he reasons, unreasonably — doesn’t everything? The loops and swirls of each letter that looked so elegant the night before with the scent of acetone sharp in his nose look rough and childish in the cold light of day. Thank God Patrick was as trashed as he was.

A crossroads looms ahead, the metaphorical stretch of two paths winding out ahead of him. The first option — the _best_ option, morally at least — is to make his excuses, leave and never see Patrick again. A one night stand that will sting for a while until he finds the _real_ PLKW waiting for him. It’s what an honourable man would do.

Pete is not an honourable man.

The second option, the one that twists at his gut in its perfect imperfection, is to keep up the lie. He’s sure he knows a guy who knows a guy, the right links to the wrong tattoo artists who won’t ask any questions about making that mark permanent. He can have PMS inked forever into his skin by lunchtime. He can commit himself to a lie of a life with a man who lives in a rundown studio in a shitty part of town.

It’s not that Pete’s like, a _snob_ or anything, but it’s not like this is the life he imagined for himself, either.

His reflection shows sallow skin, bruises blooming around his eye, his lip, his ribs and his knuckles. He’s a mess. Patrick seems sweet, dependable; a solid little dude. Pete is so painfully aware that he could do a lot worse.

He tries not to think that Patrick could do a lot better.

He meets the bloodshot weight of his own gaze unwillingly and remembers a locker room in a high school miles away, “You won’t be alone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, I really do appreciate it so much.
> 
> As always, I love to hear what you think - either in the form of comments or a little click on the kudos button, both would mean the world to me.
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers generally reliving the halcyon days of MySpace.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pete and Patrick get to know one another a little better...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, welcome back, happy Wednesday! I hope you're having a great week so far and the weekend is in sight!
> 
> You might be hoping that Pete is going to stop making a series of increasingly terrible and selfish decisions. You might be hoping that he's going to start being a little nicer to Patrick. You might be hoping...

A flickering neon sign promises the citizens of Chicago _TAT O S_ from behind a window streaked with grime and, unless Pete’s very much mistaken, the fanta-orange splash of puke stained to the glass. He’s been sat outside for close to an hour now, foot drumming a discordant rhythm that taps on every off beat of his racing pulse against the floor of his shitty Supra. Is it possible to commit to something like this and retain even the vaguest hint of moral integrity? He suspects not and he’s not sure he’s willing to sacrifice that entirely just yet.

His wrist is hot and tender, the scrape of Patrick’s lips, his tongue and teeth, the constant rubrubrub of flesh to flesh has left him crimson with friction burn. Fuck, Patrick as good as devoured him, falling on the mark like he could absorb Pete’s pulse and mix it with his own. Pete hasn’t been home yet and the stain on the thigh of his jeans — scrubbed with a handful of paper towels in a McDonald’s bathroom — is still a faint shadow of an accusation. Patrick’s come. Patrick’s wide blue eyes and hesitantly hopeful smile.

Pete is a predator and Patrick — pathetic, trusting, _ridiculous_ little Patrick — is nothing more than prey.

The burst of _Genie in a Bottle_ from his pocket makes him jump — the ringtone Joe set as a joke and Pete kept as a statement — the screen glowing bright with Chris’s name. His thumb hovers over _decline_. He hits accept and raises the handset with a sigh.

“Hey man, what’s up?” He hopes he sounds casual and not like a dude sat outside a tattoo studio he only heard about through a long-winded chain of friends, called whilst he nursed his shitty Americano in a fast food joint that was too bright, too loud, too colourfully _much._ He told them he wanted something cheap and fast, more ink by noon, and — in a testament to a lifetime of cycling friendships destroyed by his own reckless impulsiveness — no one questioned him too closely.

“Joe says you’re Patrick’s match,” Chris starts. Straight to the point, right out the gate. Pete kind of likes that about Chris sometimes. Other times it makes him want to punch him right in the dick. He also wonders if Patrick actually gave him time to get out of the fucking building before he got all Babysitters Club with his friends. “You got a mark?”

Pete glances down at streaked ink smeared to sludgy grey against crimson skin. It looks like charred flesh. Like a burn wound. “Kinda.”

“Kinda, _it appeared and Patrick’s changed_?” Chris prompts, but the tone of his voice makes it clear he knows the truth.

“Not that kinda,” Pete mutters.

“Explain what kind of _kinda_ you mean,” Chris says. Pete strongly considers hanging up, turning the car onto the interstate and never looking back. The silence stretches on until Chris breaks it. “Do you mean “I drew it on my wrist last night because I was piss ass drunk and now I’m trying to figure out a nice way to break it to Patrick” kinda?” Pete can hear the wiggle of air-quoting fingertips. “Or do you mean “I’ve done something dumb as shit and I’m about to do something dumber” kinda?”

Pete casts about for some witticism of a comeback, something sharp and funny that’s going to make Chris laugh and deflect the whole situation elsewhere.

“You’re not my mom.” He was hoping for something more elegant. “And anyway —”

“Pete,” Chris cuts him off and Pete bites his lip into the gusting sigh he swears he can feel down the line, “I need you to listen to me because this is like, _super_ _fucking serious_ , dude,” Pete lets his silence stand as acquiescence — entirely inadmissible as evidence against him in a court of law, “wherever you are, get back in your car and go home. I know what you’re thinking and it’s not going to work, do you understand?”

“Sure,” Pete nods at himself in the rearview mirror. His right eye is close to swollen shut, ugly and red with a crust of last night’s eyeliner. Quite the catch. He climbs out of the car and slams the door behind him.

“Get back in the car, Pete,” Chris implores him down the line, his voice stretching thin and tinny as Pete lowers the phone. “ _Please_ —”

He kills the call and shoves the handset deep into his pocket.

Pete pauses, hand braced to a door that’s peeling with too much lake-effect weather and not enough fresh paint. He’s weighing the scales in his mind; his fear of dying alone far sooner than he wants to anticipate versus Patrick’s right to find his soulmate. His _actual_ soulmate and not the piss poor parody that Pete represents. Surely _this_ is the fairest route? The one where everyone — but mostly Pete — gets to be happy? He slips inside; hood drawn up and hands shoved into his pockets, and loiters at the desk.

There’s a poster tacked to the wall, faded to yellow and curling up at the edges under browning tape. _NO FAKE MARKS,_ it declares, dictatorial and imposing with the Illinois Department of Health logo stamped in the bottom right corner, _DON’T ASK AND WE WON’T HAVE TO REFUSE._

“Yeah?” The guy that appears from behind a curtain at the back looks like exactly the sort of person that gives fake soulmark tattoos. Pete wonders where the fuck Charlie even heard of him but quickly decides it doesn’t matter as he rolls up his sleeve and displays his scrawled smear of fading ink.

The guy frowns at it for a moment, assessing, calculating. Pete wonders how many others have stood on this spot before him and begged for a chance to be like everyone else.

“I need this to be real,” he says, brisk and businesslike, as though his heart isn’t striking a tattoo of its own into the heat of his bruised, battered ribs.

“What makes you think I do fake marks?” the guy asks, casually rooting through a drawer for transfer paper and a pen. “You know they’re illegal, right? Jail time, unlimited fine, that kind of thing?”

“Do I look like I’m from the Department of fucking Health,” Pete asks, sharp and aggressive. He spreads his hands as the guy turns, eyebrows raised and fists coiling loosely. He has at least sixty pounds of pure muscle on Pete. Clearly, he and Charlie bonded over squat thrusts and head-shaving techniques. Pete really needs to quit running his mouth before he — this _Goliath_ , this _Conan_ , this _mountain of muscular man_ — decides to add to the canvas of swollen reds and purples already painting his skin a masterpiece of bad decisions. “Look, Charlie Marc recommended you, can you do it or not?”

“Sure,” he nods slowly and writes a number on a piece of paper roughly three times the sum Pete would expect to pay for such a simple tattoo. Pete bites his lip, nods and reaches for his wallet, thumbing out his credit card. The guy shakes his head. “Cash only, dude.”

Of course.

Pete sighs and goes for the billfold instead, counting out twenties crisp from the ATM across town onto the desk. He throws down an extra bill, just to make up for the smart mouth and to make sure the guy gets no weird ideas about fucking this up to prove a point. He’s momentarily thrown to find himself filling out the usual disclaimer form, confirming his HIV and Hepatitis status and assuring the form that yes, he’s slept well and eaten this morning. A completely futile trust exercise. By the time he’s done, those three letters are sketched onto transfer paper in the same looped script that’s haunted Pete’s adult life, his wrist cleaned and the silhouette pressed for his approval.

He nods and tries not to catch his own eyes in the mirror on the wall.

The curtain is pulled back without theatre, the chipped-tile-and-cheap-antiseptic smell much the same as every other tattoo studio Pete’s ever sat in. There’s a card pinned to a board that says _Thanks Brian_ in colourful print. Funny, he doesn’t look much like a Brian.

“So,” he tries for casual conversation as he shucks off his hoodie and sits on the chair, “how do you know Warchief?”

“Probably best if we keep this strictly professional,” Brian mutters, snapping surgical gloves into place and dropping onto a stool. “I don’t know your story, you don’t know mine.”

Pete thinks about that disclaimer form and wonders, acid hot in his rolling stomach, if he should’ve used a fake name rather than scrawling _Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz_ across every designated dotted line.

The buzz of the tattoo gun cuts through him, a pneumatic drill scraping raw against the headache blooming behind his temples. He closes his eyes as the needle touches his skin and lets the tingling sting of it smooth away the rougher edges. This part is simple, breathing deep and slow as the tattoo twists him into something new, something prettier, something with lines of licorice against caramel skin. It makes him more palatable, more interesting.

It makes people love him, at least for a while.

This one is no different, it’s just appealing in a different, more specific way to a much narrower audience. It’s an intimate acoustic set rather than a stadium show. It’s the meeting of eyes over sweat-slick bodies in a packed-tight club and the thrill of _maybe_ coiling tight in his gut. So, he keeps his eyes closed tight and his wrist held steady and drifts on the possibilities, the fairytale that might await. And if Patrick isn’t the beautiful princess, well, Pete doesn’t need to focus too hard on being the charming prince.

“All done,” Brian informs him, another wipe over his wrist as the buzzing stutters to a halt. Pete blinks in the silence, thrown fuzzy for a moment as he stares down at his wrist. PMS stares right back, bold, dark and scraped-raw tender. “I guess I don’t need to give you a lesson in after care.”

“Thanks,” Pete runs his thumb absently over the P, tracing the curve and flair of it. Give it a few weeks — a month at the outside — and Patrick will never know the difference.

“You didn’t get that here,” Brian says as he stands at the curtain and watches Pete head for the door.

Pete shrugs. It’s not the kind of thing he’s going to run around advertising.

~*~

He wakes confused, head pounding through a Xanax hangover as the light outside shifts from blue to grey. He must have slept through the afternoon. His antidepressants, anti-anxieties, anti- _personalities_ are still untouched in the bathroom cabinet. He doesn’t think he likes what they turn him into but then, he isn’t sure he likes what he is without them either. It’s complicated.

His phone is ringing with a number not a name, Christina urging him off his couch and to his knees before he can slam his head straight into the nearest wall. His wrist is throbbing, taunting him with dull, tingling pain that ricochets, pong-inspired, between his hand and the base of his skull.

“‘Lo?” he mumbles as the floor pitches a little beneath him.

“Hey,” someone far too cheerful greets him around a cacophony of clattering silverware. Pete winces. “Look, I feel like we got off on the wrong foot yesterday and I was just wondering if you wanted to go out tonight or —”

Who the fuck is this?

“Who the fuck is this?” Pete asks, because it seems like a sensible question. There’s a beat or two of silence and Pete can _hear_ the hurt down the line, carved from a sharp intake of breath. Pete blinks at his throbbing wrist and sees it, _PMS_ , distorted by shrink wrap and a smear of Preparation H.

“Patrick. It’s — it’s Patrick,” he says, voice small. Pete’s stomach gives a sudden and violent lurch to the left and he lunges for the bathroom on his knees, coughing up bile into the bowl with the phone abandoned at his side. “Pete? Pete are you there? Are you okay?”

When he’s done, when the retching gives way to sweat and stomach cramps, he collapses back against the wall, knees drawn up and reaches for the phone once more. Patrick is silent, his breath whistling down the line under a backdrop of clattering and kitchen-themed yelling. Did he mention he was a waiter when they were talking at the bar? Pete can barely remember. Yesterday. Patrick said _yesterday_. How long has he been passed out?

“Sorry about that,” Pete mutters, scraping his lips with the sleeve of a hoodie now crusted in blood, sweat, puke and come. The same one he wore to the club last night. No, the night before last. He needs to change. “Listen, I’m not really —”

“I’ll come over,” Patrick interrupts, a wall constructed entirely of his stream of consciousness preventing Pete from objecting. “I get off work in like, an hour or something. I’ll bring food, do you like pizza? Of course you like pizza, _everyone_ likes pizza. So like, plain cheese?” It would be nice if he gave Pete the opportunity to provide an answer to questions he’s pretty sure are not rhetorical. “Yeah, just something plain. And maybe garlic bread and a — you like Pepsi? Dr Pepper? I’ll get something. Joe gave me your address so just like, get comfy and I’ll come take care of you, okay? Okay. I gotta get back to work but, you know, I’ll, uh — I’ll see you real soon, ‘kay? Bye!”

Patrick rings off, either incredibly socially unaware or getting away before Pete can object and twist the knife a little further between those pale-scattered-gold shoulder blades.

Okay.

Alright, it’s totally fine. He stares at his phone and thinks about calling Patrick back and voicing some weak objection about being contagious but he’s got this guy’s initials scrawled on him forever so he figures he really needs to give this the old college try.

He hauls to his feet and looks in the mirror, poking irritably at the split in his lip. It’s healing over now, the flush of it swollen red and puffy either side of the jagged streak of clotted blood. Flashbacks haunt him like half-recalled spectres, dream-hazy and surreal, the plush wrap of Patrick’s mouth around his cock shivering something that could be revulsion or could be something else entirely down the length of his spine. He smells offensive. He should probably shower.

Patrick arrives precisely one hour and twenty-seven minutes after hanging up the phone, bursting into the apartment on a cloud of restaurant kitchen odour masked with cheap body spray. He smiles — wide, shy and half-hidden behind his lashes — and leans in to brush a kiss to Pete’s mouth over the barrier of a slightly softened pizza box clutched in his hands. Pete tries not to flinch but the flash of hurt in Patrick’s eyes suggests he doesn’t do a particularly good job of it. He mumbles something about still being sore. Patrick’s eyes slide to Pete’s wrist, dulling further when he sees the knitted cuff wrapped tight where the mark should be.

“Oh,” he starts, dark with disappointment, but Pete already has an excuse lined up in his back pocket. “Could I —”

“You bit me wide open, man,” Pete says with a grin, lighthearted and charming, fingers stretched out to tousle through what little of Patrick’s shitty haircut feathers out from beneath his hat. Patrick’s shy smile widens and Pete knows it’s the right thing to say. Okay, not the _right_ thing exactly, but it’s what Patrick wants to hear. “Like a goddamn, shit-sucking _vampire_. Had to go to the ER and get it fixed up.”

He pulls up the cuff as he’s talking, revealing the neat, white sterile dressing beneath, slapped on haphazardly to cover the evidence. It’s already stained a little from the cuff. There’s a metaphor twisted up in there somewhere, something about Pete tainting whatever he touches and little white lies. Patrick nods and smiles so wide Pete’s sure his cheeks must ache from it. He flourishes the pizza like it’s flowers. A romantic declaration of dough topped with cheese _._

“Hungry?” he asks, riptide eyes begging for forgiveness he shouldn’t even need to ask for. He didn’t do anything wrong and that thought alone makes Pete insanely irritable. “I got olives in the end, I mean — _I_ like them. And I figured…”

He figured Pete must like them too. Because they’re bonded. Soulmates. Except they’re not and Pete doesn’t, he’s just a jackass with some random dude’s name permanently inked into his skin. He doesn’t drop the smile.

“Love ‘em,” he lies, grabbing at the box and tucking away _olives_ in the neat little box file he’s set up in his head to deal with what he’s doing to this needy, hopeful, _pathetic_ kid. “Come on in, make yourself at home.”

Lying is simple, Pete decides as they watch Rushmore in that superficial, background noise sort of way when a movie is just a mask for awkward silences and stilted conversation. The act of deceit is straightforward enough and Pete can open his mouth and offer up a dozen pretty variations of a dozen different half-truths with no guilt whatsoever. He can whisper a well-worded story to whoever wants to hear it. The way to know if Pete is telling the truth — the best way — is to listen. He only tells the truth when he screams, up on stage and roaring his version of reality to a crowd.

But lying isn’t quite so straightforward when the stakes teeter impossibly high. The worst part is that Pete doesn’t even really want the prize. Patrick seems like a nice guy — far nicer than Pete — the kind of guy he’d like to be friends with, emphatically not the kind of person he wants to spend the rest of his life with. But the charade is closing in on him, self-built walls and a tightly-wrapped noose creeping closer… closer…

_PLKW._

It flashes at Pete, just a suggestion of darkness against pale skin as Patrick scratches his elbow. He takes a deep breath and zones back in to whatever Patrick is talking about, the rising inflection of his voice suggesting that it’s probably a question. Pete arranges his sore, swollen lips into his best smile.

“Hmm?”

“I said, what’s your favourite band?” Patrick prompts. Pete remembers the guitar, the haphazard vinyl collection, the posters. “Or artist. Just… what music do you like?”

Pete shifts back into the couch and considers his options.

He gets it. Really, he does. Patrick has been presented with his soulmate, the person he’s going to spend the rest of his life with. Pete’s seen this happen before with his friends, this silly little dance of high school letterman jackets and love poetry tucked into pockets. A never-ending loop of feedback screeching _“You love pizza? Ohmygodnoway! Me too!”_ the soulmark equivalent of a mating ritual that’s ultimately pointless.

But then, realistically, Patrick is completely unjustified in his line of lawyer-like inquiry. Separation is close to unheard of — why leave your shitty boyfriend when he’s the best (the _only_ ) shot you’ve got at happiness? Why rock the boat with a cheating girlfriend when the alternative is loneliness?

The thing is, Pete knows he’s lying. And Patrick does not.

“Oh yeah, right,” he buys himself a moment cramming another bite of pie into his mouth.

Should he lie? Should he sit on his couch wearing a Metallica shirt and claim that his favourite artist is Tom Waits? Should he ignore the Guns N Roses poster on the wall, the hardcore bands Patrick knows he screams for and stake his claim on Prince and the Revolution?

(It’s not really a _lie_ as such, Pete likes them in a superficial way, has albums on his mp3 player and tapes in his car. But Patrick said _favourite._ Is there a difference between half truth and total lie? Is lying by omission to save the feelings of another any better or worse than faking a soulmark?)

“All kinds of things,” he says eventually, waving his hand expansively. That’s not a lie. “A bit of this, a bit of that. You know how it is, right?”

“Right, yeah,” Patrick nods, hesitant and uncertain, as though he expected something more. Definitely disappointed, his eyes linger on Pete’s shirt. “No, it’s totally cool. I mean… we can’t have _everything_ in common, right?”

Pete looks at the weird little dude sitting on his couch in his mismatched socks and ratty thrift store t-shirt and wonders if they have anything in common _at all_ , besides the basic components of human DNA. Patrick still hasn’t taken off his hat. It sits, jammed low on his brow as he squints out from underneath the peak. Something about it, about the way he cocks his head back so he can see the screen rather than taking the fucking thing off, strikes a furious beat of irrational irritation in Pete’s chest and he yanks it away roughly, tossing it to bounce against the wall with a muted thump.

Patrick stares at him, lips slightly parted, eyes very wide, fine hair blown up with static.

Pete kisses him. He kisses him before he punches him, before he sinks his fist — still sore and throbbing from the smashed up photo frames — into the dead centre of those plush, sugar-soft lips and watches them split and bleed under his knuckles. Patrick tastes of pizza sauce and olives, salted and greasy, lips slick and soft under Pete’s as he sits, startled stiff and fists clenched at his sides. He relaxes by degrees, the softened sink of tense muscle into the plush give of satisfaction as he curls his hands around Pete’s neck and parts his lips in invitation.

He’s hesitant to start, tongue an inquisitive flicker against Pete’s, the teasing tip sweeping ticklish inside Pete’s upper lip. He hasn’t shaved for a day or two, the shimmer of sun-gold stubble scraping rough against Pete’s chin, rubbing him raw with friction burn as Patrick hums a soft little sound and fists his fingers into Pete’s hair. Lips tongues teeth and something more, sweet desperation as Patrick straddles him, pushes his ass down as Pete thrusts his hips up, cocks colliding, straining hard through zippers and denim as they rub off against one another.

Button fly jeans aren’t conducive to stealthy seduction, Pete decides, fumbling around the soft press of Patrick’s stomach against his fingers, hands crushed up between them as he tries to work yet another fucking button loose. Pete’s wearing sweatpants, easing them down with subtle little push-pulls of his ass against the couch cushions until the thick-flushed root of his cock is framed, pressed down into the neatly trimmed nest of dark curls.

Patrick is singing for him, whining little moans that jewel damp behind Pete’s ear, licking over bruises shaped like his lips  with desperate flickers of his tongue. The room is too hot, sticky-wet skin catching and snagging under hands and twisting, greedy tongues. Pete can feel each beat of his pulse along every static-crackled inch of skin. When Patrick pulls back, mouth swollen red and damp and eyes glittering sharp with lust, Pete feels a twist in his gut that he’s not sure is revulsion.

Patrick is a lot more likeable when Pete’s stuttering on the edge of orgasm.

“Oh, fuck,” Patrick breathes — and Pete is right there with him — hands knotted in the well-washed cotton of Pete’s greying shirt. “I wanna —”

“You wanna?” Pete is gasping against Patrick’s lips and there can’t possibly be enough air in the apartment to sustain them, he’s going to suffocate here on his couch, dick pulsing hard under the elasticated waistband of cheap workout sweats. Every rock of his hips drags his swollen dick against the crease of Patrick’s ass, nothing but cotton and denim and sweat between them, hands gripping hips as he mouths at Patrick’s throat, just shy of marking him up like a teenager. Patrick whines and fuck — _fuck_ — Pete’s half a thrust away from blowing in his pants. “What do you wanna?”

“I wanna —”

Christina bursts to life on the coffee table, declarations delivered that she needs to be rubbed in the right way and Pete is sort of right there with her. Patrick jumps, jerks and slips from his lap, lust-drunk and loose-limbed, a slump of unresisting muscle and bone bound in smooth, soft skin as he falls back against the couch. Pete is apparently not going to find out what _wanna_ might entail in the immediate future.

“I’ll ignore it,” Pete pleads but Patrick shakes his head, blinking like he’s dizzy as he straightens his glasses on his nose. Pete grumbles and shoves his cock most of the way back into his pants, reaching for the phone and swiping sweat stains like oil slicks across the buttons. “What do you want?”

“I spoke to Patrick.” Joe says, in lieu of a greeting, and Pete wonders how vibrating sound waves twisted over airwaves and amplified through metal and plastic manage to sound quite so annoyingly — _surprised_. “And I figured it couldn’t be true. You and _Patrick,_ dude? Like — seriously?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pete asks, light and breezy, dick still throbbing uncomfortably in his sweats.

“Well, Patrick’s like — you know — _Patrick_ ,” Joe says, the last word stressed for emphasis and sliding up half an octave or so. “And you’re, well — you.”

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?” Pete repeats, a little darker at the edges this time, shadows bleeding in, gathering in shadowed places as Patrick smiles from the other side of the couch.

“Come on, man,” Joe shrugs — Pete can hear it — and barks a short laugh. “You know what I mean, don’t be a fucking dick about it.” Unfortunately for Joe, Pete feels _entirely_ like _being a fucking dick about it._ Fortunately for Joe, Patrick is blinking at Pete from across the couch and he’s not sure he knows how to keep this conversation going without recrimination.

“Okay, well, I gotta go,” Pete singsongs, leaning across to sling his arm around Patrick’s shoulders. Patrick feels soft underneath him, warm, the scent of his skin bleeding through the stench of restaurant dishwashers as he nuzzles against Pete’s throat. “Later.”

He hangs up and switches his phone to silent, stroking his knuckles lightly across Patrick’s jaw. Patrick looks up in the split second Pete looks down, eyes wide and lips damp as Pete whispers softly, “Where were we?”

“I’m not gonna fuck you,” Patrick squeaks, volume directly in proportion to the courage of the delivery. Pete thinks that’s a pretty bold statement coming from the dude with his red-tipped cock peeking out between the waistband of his boxers and his stomach, pearl-crowned and leaking. He raises his eyebrows and meets Patrick’s eyes. Patrick blushes beacon bright and shoves his cock back into his shorts. “It’s — special. The first time with your soulmate? Isn’t it? I think it should be, anyway.”

Pete’s pretty sure there isn’t a single incarnation of Pete Wentz anywhere in the multiverse that doesn’t find every possible version of Patrick Stumph entirely fucking infuriating. A thought creeps in, insidious and sticky.

“Fuck, are you a virgin?” That would make this so much worse.

“No!” Patrick manages to inject just enough self righteous indignation into that single syllable to make Pete suspect that he’s lying through his teeth. Pete raises his eyebrows. “I’m not! I’ve done, like, a _ton_ of sex.” The way he bites his lip and lowers his eyes is indicative of the fact that he realises that that’s _precisely_ what a virgin would say. He lowers his voice in both volume and pitch, continuing quietly, “Seriously, I’m not a virgin. We can fuck around just… not that. Not yet.”

“Right.” Pete’s still sort of half hard and thinking about getting off in a lazy, late night jerking off kind of way. He feels close to sticky, the damp spot on his pants a testament to the danger of rolling hips in quiet rooms.

“I should go,” Patrick mumbles into his shirt collar. “It’s late.”

“Want to stay over?” Pete offers. He tells himself it’ll be more fun to have Patrick get him off with those insanely pretty lips than to go to the effort of jerking off and all the messy clean up that goes along with it.

“I don’t have pyjamas,” Patrick is a burst of summer day smiles as Pete trips to his feet and hauls Patrick with him. Pete’s wrist twinges with the telltale tightening itch of fresh ink and he fidgets with the dressing for a moment. Patrick reaches out to touch, the need to trace the loops of his initials as clear as the _PLKW_ at his own wrist.

“That’s fine.” Pete shoves off his sweats and hands them over, revelling in the way Patrick fights a battle between staring at Pete’s cock and staring at the floor. Pete takes hold of himself and slowly rolls his thumb over the wet, red head, pulling himself up against his stomach to smear sticky-wet shine against the dark ink of his tattoo. His cock immediately wins and distraction is officially achieved as Patrick groans around his lower lip. “You can take mine.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I hope you're enjoying it so far. 
> 
> Comments and kudos are always AMAZING and, if you want, you can find me on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers
> 
> Have a great week, friends, see you next week!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pete gets to know Patrick a little better...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, welcome back! It's a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon where I am. Should we toss in some soulmark Peterick?
> 
> The forecast is angst with a chance of, well... more angst.

“Did you think we’d have more in common?” Patrick asks, wearing three days worth of stubble and Pete’s washed out Misfits shirt with his own ratty Star Wars boxers. He’s poking at a bowl of Lucky Charms without much enthusiasm. Obviously not his favourite.

“We have these,” Pete holds out his wrist for Patrick’s inspection. Two weeks into the healing process it looks pretty good, lizard-scale peel giving way to fresh, black ink. Soulmarks never fade, never dull and blur. This lie is going to require regular, expensive maintenance. “Isn’t that enough?”

Patrick holds out his own wrist, admiring the loop and curve of the letters, the contrast of their skin and the stain of Pete’s tattoos. He nods, lips tucked up in a dreamy half-smile. Pete is in the wrong apartment, wrong room, wrong _skin_ , itching with dissonance as he looks at this strange little dude with his shaggy hair and ill-advised sideburns.  

“Yeah,” Patrick nods, brushing a bristled kiss to Pete’s wrist, tongue flicking out to drag over the mark. Pete still wants to yank his arm free, to pull it back and tell Patrick he’s a fucking idiot for falling for this. He bites his tongue until he’s sure he’ll taste blood. “I guess it is.”

Pete smiles — big wide _fake_ — and pulls Patrick’s mouth to his.

~*~

Pete  wakes up disoriented and huffing drool from the back of his forearm, sheets tangled around his legs as he kicks free and sits up. For a moment, he doesn’t know what feels so different, just that something isn’t right.

He realises, with the tick-tick-tick of his watch at his wrist, that what’s different is that he’s alone.

There’s no wind of pale arms around his waist, no sour morning breath huffed into his face as Patrick sleeps with his mouth open. Just cooling sheets and off-balance panic as he looks around desperately for evidence that Patrick is _real_ and not just a benzo trip.

Dirty jeans on the floor, a couple of caps lined up on the nightstand, battered converse and a Taking Back Sunday shirt in a size too big for Pete. He relaxes, breath hissed over clenched teeth, and lets his pulse calm and stop ringing in his ears like radio static. Then he hears it, low and soulful, picking over a melody that he’s never heard but knows intimately. For a second he thinks it’s the radio but it changes in pitch and power, rumbling up and up as the singer loosens untrained vocal cords.

Pete rolls to his knees and presses his ear to the party wall between bedroom and bathroom. Patrick sings on, something sultry and bluesy that shivers down Pete’s spine like a caress. He realises he’s tapping out the bassline against the wall at the precise moment Patrick falls silent. He emerges after a few minutes, pink from steam and maybe something more, a towel around his waist and his glasses fogged.

“I didn’t know you could sing,” Pete says, not looking up from his book, as though he’s completely disinterested.

“You never asked,” Patrick replies. Pete tries not to notice that it’s an accusation. “I didn’t know _you_ wrote poetry.”

“I don’t.” Pete lies without thinking, a defensive gesture borne from decades of practice.

“I read it,” Patrick counters, arms folded across his chest and eyes brimmed with triumphant challenge. Recognition stammers Pete speechless — _that’s_ why he recognised the song, those were _his_ words, twisted around Patrick’s tongue on unfamiliar soundwaves. “I found your LiveJournal.”

“You — stalked me?” Pete asks, voice soft and dangerous. He’s caught in a ridiculous paradox of self righteous indignation at the invasion of his privacy layered over the knowledge that he’s bearing a fake soulmark with Patrick’s initials. Right from wrong never looked so insincere but Pete wears it like an ill-advised fashion statement. “Do you have any idea how fucking _invasive_ — ”

“It’s not like I had a choice!” Two bright spots of colour stain the pale skin high on Patrick’s cheekbones, his lower lip quivering with tears he’s too proud to shed. “You don’t fucking _talk_ to me about _anything_ . I’m supposed to be your _soulmate_ and all you do is shut me out!”

There’s a crackle of something like static electricity, building pre-storm tension and Pete’s half a breath away from screaming the truth as he rolls to his feet and heads for the door, sticky syllables sticking to the back of his tongue, poison barb sharp and ready to hurt. He takes a deep breath and heads for the front door, determined to maroon Patrick in an apartment he doesn’t feel comfortable with, just to prove a point.

“Don’t look at my fucking stuff,” he snarls from the doorway. Patrick blinks glassy-sharp tears into the back of his wrist and Pete feels a stab in his gut that could be satisfaction but is probably guilt. “You’ve got no fucking right.”

He slams the door. Patrick’s voice haunts him for the rest of the night, a spectred heat in his heart that whispers half-thoughts and semi-sense. He gets home late — and wasted — to the apartment standing empty, hats, jeans and shirt all missing. It doesn’t matter, not when he can fill the silence with the scratch of pen to paper and quiet the noise in his head with the flow of pretty ink.

~*~

Pete is knife-sharp and buzzed with a post-show high. A two foot riser above a crowd of disenchanted teenagers isn’t the stadium dream he nurses in private places, but it takes away the edge, methadone to an addict. He saw Patrick in the shadows against the wall, head nodding and lips pursed, wincing every time Pete  sang in a way that almost stung.

He doesn’t like that he wants Patrick’s approval. He likes it even less that he wanted to call him up, to shove him in front of the microphone and beg him to make the words that jitter through him make sense.

They’re packed into Joe’s van and rumbling back to Wilmette, Patrick tucked in close to his side as he hums something under his breath. Secondhand cigarette smoke and spilled beer cling to him like day-old cologne, top notes of scent over soap and deodorant and maybe, if Pete leans his head in just the right way, of warm skin and salt. The streetlights flash above them, messy yellow streaks of fluorescent light that burn Patrick up like touchpaper. Pete thumbs across his cheekbone and stares out of the window.

“Drop us by Gilson Park,” he commands without thinking about _why_ , running on instinct as they swing through an intersection. Joe raises his eyebrows in the rear view mirror but doesn’t object. Patrick sighs, slow and lazy and ruffling warm breath over Pete’s neck.

“Why?” he asks, thick lower lip scraping against Pete’s earlobe.

“Don’t know,” Pete admits, shoulders hitched in a shrug as he watches the street signs flash by.

The van rolls away in a cloud of exhaust fumes that probably exceed state guidelines and friendly accusations of swingset blowjobs. Pete just grins and throws an arm around Patrick’s shoulders, dragging him through shot-velvet darkness. He lies back on a picnic table, hands clasped behind his head and legs dangling over the side. Patrick lies top to tail, their lips level as they look up at the sky.

Pete’s hoping for a shooting star even though he has no idea what he’ll wish for.

They’re silent, shallow breaths and cicadas their soundtrack, as Pete plays his tongue lightly against the back of his teeth. Patrick is frowning at the sky like he’s trying to count the crushed diamonds above them, lips moving  as he squints.

“So,” he begins eventually, eyes moving but not his head as he looks at Pete across the warm-wood scent of the table top. “Do you want me to blow you?”

Pete’s laughing before his brain has fully processed what Patrick just said, shoulders shaking and throat contracting around a thousand declarations he doesn’t know how to make. Patrick blushes, blood-bright and glowing in the velvet blue of a midsummer night, his t-shirt sticking to sweat-damp skin.

“No,” Pete shakes his head around a giggle, Patrick frowns a little deeper, blushes a little brighter and mumbles something uncomplimentary, “I just… I wanted to hang out for a while. I’m not ready to go home.”

“Right.” Simple as that. Pete likes that Patrick doesn’t push things in the way other people do.

“Do you ever feel like — different?” Pete asks the sky above them, velvet blue scattered with the lacework of tree branches reaching like a canopy above them. He knows he isn’t making much sense and hears Patrick turn his head to look at him. “You know, like — like maybe you’re not _right_?”

Visions of pill bottles dance in his head, prescriptions and talking therapy that manifested long before the mark — or lack of — became an issue. The calloused warmth of Patrick’s fingertips brush Pete’s jaw absently, it feels close to natural to turn his head and nudge his lips against them.

“You were around when it happened, weren’t you?” Patrick says, in lieu of an answer (or maybe it _is_ his answer) voice a low hum that layers under the cicadas. Pete nods without needing to ask what _it_ is. He means The Marking; the morning in 1982 when every adult woke with a series of letters on their wrist. No explanation, no guidebook, just a vague set of theories that slowly solidified over the next few months. “Do you remember it?”

“I was like, _three_ ,” Pete shrugs and rolls to his elbow. Shadows skitter across the planes of Patrick’s face, washing his eyes from blue to grey to green and back again.

“Oh,” the rose petal curve of his lips rounds into a crooked circle in the centre of his face as he blinks up, “were your mom and dad…?”

Pete nods again and thinks about recounting the tale of his mom losing her shit because, for a moment, she forgot about her birth name, so used to her married name that the _DL_ shining at his dad’s wrist made no sense. He bites it off as Patrick’s brow furrows and he blinks slowly, his throat working around the lifebuoy bob of his adam’s apple.

“Mine weren’t,” Patrick whispers like he’s taking confession, the words hissing hot and painful between them as he keeps his eyes firmly on infinity above them. Pete’s heard about that happening, families torn down the seams in a quest for the something-more that might be waiting. He holds his breath and makes a wish that he won’t fuck this up. “My mom wanted to — to try. I’ve got an older brother and sister and — for them, you know? You ever heard the term band-aid baby? Well, that was me,” he bites his lip, teeth sinking down into the lush plumpness of it, “I guess I wasn’t enough. My dad lives out in Washington now with his real family.”

A diamond shine sparkles bright across Patrick’s eyes as he blinks furiously, teeth working hard over the trembling shudder of his lower lip. A breath eases gently from Pete, the threat of wrong words and platitudes he won’t mean gusting warm and sticky between them. Patrick sniffs hard and shakes his head, hand raised to shield him from the inevitable foot-in-mouth that Pete will bestow.

Contrary to the sum total of his actions over the past month or so, Pete isn’t an idiot. He knows they’re not really soulmates, he knows he doesn’t _have_ a soulmate. But sitting with Patrick’s solid warmth beside him, the hitch of his breathing and the smell of warm creosote and dew-damp grass flooding him with memories of summer vacation, he could almost imagine he feels a pang of affection for the sweet-eyed boy with the shy smile.

“Patrick, I — ”

“It’s fine,” he shakes his head weakly and rolls off the table, sitting on the bench and staring at the jungle gym like it owes him an explanation. “Seriously, it’s just — it happened to a ton of kids, right? We’re like, Generation Two Christmases.”

There is a click and a whir in the synapses and neurons that misfire constantly to create Pete Wentz: Master of Misadventure. The heavy clunk of a cog falling into place that lowers a banner — a fucking holiday parade — that screams _he’s a fucking_ person _, you idiot_! Patrick is more — so much more — than four letters on his wrist and Pete is the cross-threaded bolt that will warp and damage him until he’s used and broken too.

For the first time, he’s hit with the _significance_ of what he’s doing. Guilt swirls him sick as he scrabbles after Patrick, knees either side of his ribs and arms slung around his shoulders in not-quite-casual-indifference. He rests his chin against the mesh-caught crown of Patrick’s head and smells the tang of shampoo and sweat as he claws the ragged edges in and tries to make them whole.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Pete insists, unsure if he’s talking about the internalised pain of being a band-aid baby or his own crushing sense of inadequacy at being a blank. “None of it, you couldn’t _change_ it and — it’s just unfair. I’m sorry.”

Patrick’s hand covers Pete’s at his chest, warm and rough and clasping him close to the shuddered stutter of his hitching breaths. The graze of his lips to the fall of dirty blond hair that shields the back of that milk-pale neck surprises Pete almost as much as it seems to surprise Patrick. He does it again, chapped lips snagging on mouthfuls of hair, skin and cotton as he kisses along the brim of Patrick’s hat, scraping his ear, his temple, the cold plastic of his Buddy Holly glasses.

He finds the shaved-smooth curve of Patrick’s chin with callous-rough fingertips, turning his head to kiss him — deep and desperate — over the line of his shoulder. The taste of cheap beer and bubblemint gum bleeds over his tongue, the salt and stickiness of spit-thick tears that Patrick is still pretending aren’t falling staining them both. Pete feels like a bruise, tender and ugly and shaped with hurt.

When they ease apart, Patrick is smiling, fingers caught and laced with Pete’s, the flare of knuckles knitted flush as he leans back into his chest. The strength of his sigh seems enough to gust them both away. Pete hopes it’s to somewhere better than here.

“We should’ve come here sooner,” Patrick says, a flutter to his voice that perfectly matches the warm curl in Pete’s chest. He jumps forward and Pete burns with the loss of contact, summer air suddenly chilling him shivered as Patrick takes off across the grass, his laughter bubbling between them. “Race you to jungle gym, asshole!”

For a moment, Pete does nothing more than watch him — glorious, vibrant, _innocent_ Patrick — streaking a stagger across the park, graceless and charming. Arms around his knees and chin tucked down to them, he feels the shape of his grin against denim and wonders why everything suddenly seems like something more. The roof has been torn off the skyline and Pete is choking on too much ozone. Chicago is a snowglobe in reverse, sticky summer heat sucking sparkle from the air. Pete is the man in the centre trying to grab onto it as it flutters through his fingers.

His laugh tastes a little sweeter as Patrick jumps for the monkey bars, misses entirely and crashes to his ass, head tipped back and lips parted in a whoop called straight at the stars. Then, Pete is on his feet, springing over the slip-slide of sun-scorched grass to crash down amongst the rain-damp wood chips with Patrick, sweeping outlines of angels into the bark.

~*~

**_OPERATION SYMPOSIUM CRACKS DOWN ON COUNTERFEIT SOULMARKS_ **

_A series of arrests made in and around the city over the past two days has closed down a number of illegal soulmark operations. Tattoo artists working outside of local and federal legislation and Department of Health guidelines were detained for further questioning with official charges expected within the next twenty-four hours._

~*~

It’s difficult to keep track of the reasons not to reciprocate the hesitant pressure of Patrick’s hands under sweat-damp sheets. There’s no air conditioning in his airless, hopeless little apartment (no hot water, either, most of the time) and summer heat hangs thick and oppressive. The air tastes sticky with salt-sweat as pale hands roam the gold of Pete’s skin, traced and chased by plump, pink lips.

“You have so many tattoos.” Patrick smiles at him, a dreamy, summertime smile like holiday romances and kisses flavoured with ice cream sandwiches and root beer floats. Pete smiles back and tucks a lock of dirty blonde hair behind his ear. His body feels limp and unresisting, noodle-soft but for the aching throb of his cock between his legs. It feels like a sunburn; stiff and tight and hard enough to burst, sticky-wet and messy.

“Do you like them?” Pete asks, limbs lax and lazy as he sinks into the mattress.

Patrick pauses, considers, eyebrow cocked and fingertips following the flow of Jack’s mocking leer, “Yeah. Yeah, I really do.”

Warm hands curl around his biceps as that lush-lipped mouth teases to Pete’s. Patrick kisses with a hesitant sort of hunger, shyly requesting relief rather than grabbing grasping _taking_. He tastes of the sickly-sweet strawberry milkshake melting to pink foam in a McDonald’s cup on the nightstand and smells of sweat-hot skin.

The weeks of blowjobs and handjobs and rubbing themselves sticky against one another has yet to grow old. Pete’s never felt entirely comfortable around guys, never wanted rough male hands or the bitter-salt flood of come on his tongue. He has no idea why Patrick — shaggy haired, round-bellied, myopic little Patrick — is the exception. But he finds himself groaning around a grin as Patrick straddles his hips with an uncertain quirk of a smile, his lungs grasping greedily, choking on the air like liquid as Patrick reaches down and takes their cocks in one hand.

He’s nervous and fumbling, lip bitten like he’s recalling half-forgotten porn watched illicitly on warped cassette tapes under a Batman comforter in a suburban bedroom. Pete lies still and tries not to look at the fuck-flushed length of Patrick’s cock pushed up against his own.

“Am I — is this alright?” he asks, his voice hushed and hesitant. Pete glances up and meets his eyes with a shrug, fingertips trailing along the crest of his cheekbone. “Do you want me to stop?” Pete shakes his head so slowly he’s not entirely sure he’s moving. “Okay.”

Patrick pushes down and Pete arches up, the push-pull of friction shuddering through him as he closes his eyes. It turns out that Patrick can moan in harmony, each sigh pitching perfectly above Pete’s as he writes a song for the two of them that catches something painful in the dead centre of Pete’s throbbing, aching heart.

Cock to cock they thrust and rub, each downstroke met with a push up, each slick of sweat and bead of sticky-salt that blooms bright on blood-flushed pricks strikes an ache in Pete’s heart. Patrick looks ridiculous, thrusting on Pete’s lap with his sweat-stringy hair and big, pink cock but for once it sparks affection, not irritation in his gut. He laughs, but it’s not unkind, hands grasping at pale hips as Patrick stutters and falters.

“We look so fucking stupid,” Pete observes around a mouthful of grin-bright teeth. Patrick’s giggle is breathless and beautiful, head thrown back and throat exposed.

“I know,” he agrees, squeezing hard enough to make Pete yelp. “I’m still gonna fucking come though…”

Each messy thrust of uncoordinated hips, each jarring jolt of mistimed want brings him a little closer. Sensation floods like shower spray down Pete’s spine, shuddering him half-mad with desire as he drives upwards desperately. Arched hips and tingling lips, he drags Patrick down to kiss him, wet and messy and slick with spit from too much tongue. It drags their cocks together, crushing them up between their stomachs as Patrick shudders, spine-straight and stuttering a moan over Pete’s lips.

“ _Fuuuck_!” Patrick draws it out, too many syllables and sticking to his mouth like molasses as he slicks a sticky mess to pool between them, stomachs coated with bitter-bleach come. “Oh, shit…”

Pete moves him quickly, trapping the throbbing length of his cock between Patrick’s thighs, bracketing them with his own to pin him tight as he thrusts up, eyes closed and lips twisted in private prayer. It’s almost like fucking a girl if he ignores the grate of Patrick’s sideburns against his cheek.

It hits him like something solid, knocking the breath from his body as the sweat-slippery slick of Patrick’s thighs rub him to something that feels like insanity. He doesn’t _want_ to ignore the sideburns. He is the madman on the roof, burning up in the midday sun and watching castles in the clouds.

He comes, confused, back arched and vision blurring black to gold and back again as his orgasm takes him by surprise. Patrick’s thighs are left streaked with cooling come, his eyes half-closed as he sighs something that sounds like contentment into the curve of Pete’s throat.

“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” This time, he says it without making it sound like an accusation. This time, Patrick nods, nose still buried in Pete’s neck and eyes hidden until he cups his face and coaxes him out, lips brushing smooth and soft as he kisses him. “Why’d you lie?”

“Look at you,” Patrick whispers, eyes fixed on the lie of Pete’s soulmark like it means something. “And look at me. Wouldn’t you lie?”

Look at Patrick — golden, decent, honest little Patrick.

Look at Pete — blank and blackened. No soulmark. He’s often wondered if that means no soul.

It’s no contest.

“Don’t lie to me,” Pete implores, rather than explain _why._ “Ever. About anything.”

Patrick rolls to his side, the rip of skin glued with sweat and come almost agonising and hissed through sharp breaths that taste of one another’s mouths. He curls into Pete’s side, dirty blonde hair fanned out against the gold-twisted-black of Pete’s shoulder, mouthing at salt-tang skin with lazy lips. The shitty desk fan whirs next to them, stirring up hot, sticky air that reeks of cock and come. Pete rakes idle fingers through Patrick’s hair, twisting it loosely around them until Patrick purrs softly.

“Why do you live here?” he asks into the afternoon heat. Patrick’s shoulders twitch in a shrug.

“Close to work,” Patrick says with just the right level of bored indifference that means he knows exactly what Pete means.

“No, _here_ ,” Pete waves a hand to take in the patches of damp, the cracked plaster, the smell of next door’s weed habit drifting under the drywall. “This apartment, specifically.”

“I’m a fucking _waiter_ ,” Pete can hear the eye roll even though Patrick is careful not to look at him, “I make four bucks an hour — ”

“Plus tips?” Patrick snorts, ugly and scathing at the back of his nose.

“Tips? I drop more shit than I serve. I don’t make much in tips.”

“So...” The question dances on the tip of Pete’s tongue, invasive and unfair considering he’s able to live in a decent apartment in an affluent suburb only because his parents don’t trust him to behave like an adult and pay his own rent. His lifestyle is maintained easily enough by the money he makes playing shows and selling shirts and home-burnt CDs. He’s _lucky._ “So, why aren’t you still at home?”

It seems in the silence that Patrick won’t answer. Pete supposes that silence isn’t a lie, reminding himself that he has no right to every corner of Patrick’s life. Delicate fingertips trace the dark pebble of his nipple until Patrick heaves a sigh.

“I flunked out of Northwestern,” he admits, quiet as church halls. “I fucked it up and — and my mom paid tuition but I couldn’t… I couldn’t _focus,_ you know? I was studying music but I didn’t want to do the theory. No, wait, I — like, I _wanted_ to but — but I _couldn’t._ Anyway, my grades bombed and I jumped before I was pushed.”

“She wouldn’t let you go back home?” Pete asks, quietly horrified. “Dude, that’s fucked!”

“No,” Patrick shakes his head like he can change his reality; the shake of a magic 8 ball that won’t shift from _ask again later_ , _“I_ couldn't do it. I couldn’t walk back home after two quarters and admit I — I couldn’t do it. So, here I am. In my shitty little apartment with my shitty little job and my shitty little life.”

“Don’t say that,” Pete objects. Patrick kisses him, lips stealing further interaction as he slides his fingers into the jet-dark fall of Pete’s hair.

“Hey, I have you now,” he whispers in a way that makes Pete’s heart crack and shatter and his wrist throb with guilt. “Things are looking up.”

Hours later, when Patrick sleeps under the blue-grey flicker of the TV screen, Pete’s arm tossed over him in casual possession, Pete makes a decision. He might not be Patrick’s actual mark, but he can be the mark he deserves.

~*~

Pete is half crazed in the witching hour that hovers between too late to call it a late night and too early to feasibly pass it off as greeting the dawn. That silvered place that lingers somewhere between three and five in the morning when the world feels entirely his in all of the most crushingly lonely ways.

His pen scratches over the paper, looping and scrawling, uncontrollably large one second, whisper-small the next. Consciousness streams from him, down through his fingers to bleed across the page.

Breathing hard, burning lungs and burning eyes, he reads back through it and promptly hurls the book against the wall with a thud and a flutter of paper. It’s not _right_ , it’s doesn’t _make sense._

In the bedroom beyond the wall, something stirs.

The thud is echoed by bare feet on flooring, the soft shuffling thump of staggered footsteps and the apparition of Patrick, ghost-pale, owl-eyed and blinking under the sleep-trashed mess of his hair. He mumbles something around a yawn as he stoops to pick up the notebook, flicking casually through the pages with a bite of his lip. They share a glance, a conversation without words as he crosses the living room to drop onto the couch next to Pete.

“What you did in the shower,” Pete whispers and Patrick blinks at him once more, nodding hazily as he turns through the times Pete could be referring to, “when I told you to stay out of my things? I — you were the only one that made it make sense,” he pauses to close his eyes and suck a deep breath through his teeth, “please — I need you to make me make sense.”

Patrick leans back into the couch cushions and considers the notebook in his hands. Stomach coiled tight with the dark thorns of mediocrity and misunderstanding snagging sharp at his heels, Pete waits, breath held and hot. He’s certain he’d throw up if there was anything in his stomach other than coffee and burnt-black adrenaline. The ink on the pages smudges under Patrick’s thumb, a streak of black to grey that’s far too close to the sharpie Pete stained to his wrist on a night that feels a lifetime ago. He can’t breathe, the walls too close, the ceiling too low, his pulse too loud and sharp and —

“Hey, calm down,” Patrick says, soft and low and murmured around the frame of cool, pale hands to the flushed-hot burn of Pete’s cheeks. “Breathe with me,” Patrick sucks in a deep breath as he speaks, holds it one-two-three, then gusts it out, tickling soft through Pete’s lashes and bangs, “I’ve got you, I’m right here, just breathe.”

Just breathe.

He lets the swell of Patrick’s lungs envelop him, the warmth of shared body heat a security blanket and hands pressing into his bare shoulders until he’s humming on each exhale. Patrick strokes a thumb lightly across Pete’s cheek and he wonders — absent, out of body and drifting — if he should be embarrassed that it comes away smudged damp with tears.

Listen, it’s not that Pete’s like, _embarrassed_ to cry in front of anyone or anything. Emotions are his currency traded for screaming voices echoing in his ears from the God-like elevation of a stage. But he’s sort of embarrassed to cry like _this_ , small and alone on his couch dressed in nothing but his underwear and self-loathing.

And, it’s not that Pete’s like, _grateful_ for the way Patrick doesn’t judge him. But it’s pretty nice to be held through the panic attack, to be rocked in soft-sure silence until his breathing slows his heart rate slows his breathing in a spiralling loop of sweet serenity.

“You good?” Patrick asks in a whisper, lips plushly parted and pressed to Pete’s temple, damp, hot, slick. Pete nods into the cotton of Patrick’s shoulder, breathes in fabric softener and cheap cologne. “Good. Okay,” he picks up the book once more and, one arm around Pete’s shoulders, thumbs through the pages with a frown, “Yeah. Yeah, I can do something with this. I’m gonna need coffee and my guitar.”

“We don’t have to do this right now,” Pete says, aware that he absolutely _does_ have to do this right now.

“I know.” Patrick lifts one shoulder and smiles and the world seems to tip a little closer towards dawn. “But we will.”

We.

Look, it’s not that it’s like, _important_ or anything. But Pete thinks he might be falling in love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See? There's empathy somewhere in that dark little emo heart of his. That's all for this week, hope you're enjoying it so far.
> 
> Comments and kudos would be awesome or you can find me on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers!
> 
> Remember, it's almost the weekend :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pete falls further...
> 
> And lands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're from the other side of the Atlantic, I hope you're enjoying celebrating this, the anniversary of you independence from _this_ side of the Atlantic!
> 
> As a token of apology, please accept some soulmark AU.

Pete’s shitty cassette player is warping and chewing the tape, slightly distorted sound waves that shudder through the speakers to _tap tap tap_ the beat of his fingertips against the steering wheel. The engine is idling — which means he totally doesn’t have to drop a couple of coins into the parking meter — his eyes quick-sharp focussed for the familiar flash of a parking officer. He’s not _parked_ , just _waiting._

The rear-view mirror reflects the street behind him back into sharp focus, the summer-softened sidewalks humming with foot traffic as he sighs at the dashboard and laments his broken air conditioner. It’s hotter than the seventh circle of hell in the car, the heater stuck on full even in the summer stickiness. Chicago has two settings; six feet of snow or melt the flesh from your bones heat and right now, his sweat-sticky skin gluing to the faux leather upholstery, he’s thinking nostalgically of the former.

Thump-flop heart skip; he catches sight of Patrick walking towards him, hands shoved down into his pockets and bouncing on the balls of his feet with each step. _Sunrise shine in the midnight sky_ like he’s in Fat Larry’s Band. Thud-thump heart drop; he feels it give an uncomfortable little lurch when he sees the _other_ guy walking alongside him.

Maybe it’s the way the heat-hazed sunlight twists into the gold of hair feathered softly beneath a brightly coloured trucker hat that catches his attention. Perhaps it’s the way Patrick leans just a little too close to the dark-haired guy with him (tall, willowy, tangled hair fluttering around his face like that prick thinks he’s a young David Cassidy). Possibly it’s the way he tilts his head up to smile at the stranger for a beat too long, too many teeth under plush-plump lips. Whatever it is, Pete knows that he doesn’t like it at all.

They bro hug six feet from the car — since when does _Patrick_ bro hug? — goodbyes offered and numbers exchanged. Jealousy tastes sour at the back of Pete’s tongue as his fingers flex against the steering wheel. Patrick opens the passenger door and tumbles down into the seat, lips brushing to Pete’s across the sun-scorched heat of the parking brake.

“Hey,” he smiles, hat pulled off and sweat swept away on the back of his wrist. He smells of work; kitchen cleaner and dishwasher fluid. Pete’s nose wrinkles in irritation. “What’s up?”

Pete considers his answer, the best way to explain to Patrick that what he just saw slipped from harmless friendship and into open flirtation. Patrick is a sweet kid, there’s every possibility he didn’t know… Pete scratches at the tattoo on his wrist — fully healed and smooth — and clears his throat.

“Who the fuck was that?” Apparently, he’s leapt from gentle inquiry to outright hostility without prior knowledge or consent. Patrick’s eyebrows raise as he flicks a glance in the wing mirror — probably trying to get a good look at the retreating ass of whoever-the-fuck-that-was. “You gonna answer?”

“He’s just — some guy from work,” Patrick shrugs as though it doesn’t matter. Pete’s nails sink a little harder into the rubber-coated, moulded plastic of the steering wheel, teeth clenched too hard. “A new guy. Paul.”

He licks suddenly dry lips and nods, hands at ten and two as he knocks on the blinker and eases the car out into traffic. If he’s being entirely honest — which he doesn’t really like to be — he feels like a total jackass, an apology tripping at the tip of his tongue.

“Are you listening to _Sugarcult_?” Patrick asks, before Pete can phrase his _I’m sorry_. The cupcake-shaped air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror has flooded the car with chemical fake-vanilla sweetness, cloying and thick enough to give him a headache.  There’s a razor sharp edge of incredulous accusation to Patrick’s voice that slices the length of Pete’s spine, dragging him open and exposed.

“Yeah,” he mutters, vague and disinterested, faking that navigating the surface streets to Patrick’s apartment is a drain on his concentration. “I guess so.”

“Huh.”

Sweat prickles the back of Pete’s neck, beading sticky and sharp and rolling ticklish trails that bleed into the cotton of his shirt. Too hot, too much, the press of red and orange at the corners of his vision as he bites his lip and takes a breath.

“Is that — a problem?” It’s kind of hilarious how Patrick shrugs, smiling blandly through the dust-smeared windshield and making a vague little gesture with his left hand. Kind of hilarious whilst also being not even remotely amusing at all. Pete bites his tongue to keep from screaming.

“Paul likes Bowie,” Patrick says. Pete hums like he’s interested whilst imagining driving his fist straight into the centre of Paul’s stupid, smug fucking face. Or possibly driving the car straight into the nearest wall. “He collects vinyl, too. We just — you know when you talk to someone and it’s like,” he pauses to stare contemplatively at the cityscape rolling by like a background reel, “it’s like you’ve known them _forever_ but like, you know you haven’t so it’s still kind of fun getting to know them?”

“Nope,” Pete shakes his head like he can blur the reality into fantasy. _His_ fantasy. Because the reality is starting to make a horrible kind of sense that turns him sick. “Never had that.”

“Paul West,” Patrick laughs lightly and Pete scowls at the speedometer as though it’s personally responsible. “You know what’s weird? He has PMS, you know, as his mark. How wild is _that_?”

The _PMS_ at Pete’s wrist seems to visibly beat in time with Pete’s pulse, a tell-tale heart of accusation.

P is for Pete and the bound novel of fuck ups he hauls along behind him. P is for the parachute that’s needed in freefall. P is for pills, the ones untouched in the bathroom cabinet. P is also for Paul.

“Yeah,” Pete agrees, a hot knot of fury clawing up his throat, apparently determined to choke him. “Fucking _wild_ , man.”

Okay, there’s a very real possibility that Patrick has met his soulmate. His _actual_ soulmate and not the cheap, dollar store knock off that Pete represents. The important thing — the thing that Pete needs to keep in mind — is that Patrick doesn’t _know_ this. The skin around his thumbnail snags between his teeth as he worries at it, watching tail lights and license plates and the incessant up-down-bounce of the kid rolling loose in the back seat of the SUV up front.

His pulse is ruffling the cotton of his shirt, stretched taut across his chest beneath the snug press of his seatbelt. Count the breaths and watch the clock, hold each one until it aches and burns as Patrick fidgets, caught between drawing his feet up against his ass or bracing them to the dashboard as he thumbs through his phone. He giggles quietly, underscored by the _taptaptap_ of digits over keys. Pete aches with how much he’s grown to care about the weird little dude on his passenger seat.

“You know why they call it Operation Symposium?”

Pete’s head snaps to the right, the crick in his neck numbing his tongue and pooling hot and liquid into his jaw as he stares at Patrick, wide-eyed and thumb still caught between his teeth. Pale fingers gesture expansively to the news stand on the sidewalk, the black print displaying the evening headline in bold lettering. **OPERATION SYMPOSIUM: MORE ARRESTS MADE.** He must hum or shrug or fucking choke on his tongue in response because Patrick’s carries on like he answered.

“That creepy fake soulmark bullshit?” a lazy prompt as Patrick roots through his messenger bag, stirring up the smell of stale pasta and restaurant heat, “It’s because that fucking — what’s his name? I dunno — some greek philosopher. Anyway, he wrote in the Symposium about how like, people used to be joined to their soulmate but then fucking _Zeus_ or some shit cut them all in two. So they ran around looking for their other half, and when they found them? Boom. Soulmates,” he glances down at his right wrist with a grin, “Paul told me that today.”

Pete sinks his teeth into his cheek until it aches, shivered with the twitch of a muscle ticking in his jaw in time with the frantic bird flutter of his pulse. Blood tastes almost sweet around a mouthful of cinnamon gum. It’s almost as though Patrick knows, like he’s taunting him, _goading_ him into a reaction. He slides a glance across the sweatbox of a Toyota but Patrick just smiles vaguely and looks back down at his phone.

Pete shrugs, lips twisted into a grimace, “I didn’t know that.”

The thing is, Pete is particularly bad at knowing the right time to talk, the right time to think and the right time to shut his damn mouth and stare vacantly at the car in front. Unfortunately, today doesn’t seem as though it’s going to contain a grand epiphany as he continues, gritted teeth and words hissed hard and intended to hurt. “Anything _else_ Paul knows about? Maybe I should take you to _Paul’s_ place, hmm? Maybe you’d let _him_ fuck you.”

Nothing about that tastes as sweet as Pete hoped it would. It slicks, bitter as blood on the tip of his tongue as Patrick flinches back into the door. It would be just _super fucking awesome_ if he could suck words back in quite as easily as he seems to be able to spit them out like knives. They fall silent, the scratch and pop of the worn out cassette and the hum and honk of pointless car horns the only soundtrack to Pete’s unfurling panic.

“He asked me out,” Patrick mutters into his shirt collar, head bowed and profile lost behind the curtain fall of honey-blonde hair, curling damp with sweat behind the pale shell of his ear. Pete is the magnetic quiver of a compass point and Patrick is true north, fingers caught in irresistable polarity as he swipes them through the silk-soft fall of it. Apparently emboldened, Patrick raises his head, raises his voice, raises his fucked-raw fury as he snarls through clenched teeth. “He asked me out, asshole, and I said _no._ I told him I’d already met my mark, _okay_? Jesus fucking _Christ_ , are you happy now?”

It may come as a surprise to no one in the room that Pete is close to the polar opposite of _happy_ right at this particular moment. He could apologise — he knows he _should_ apologise — but _sorry_ never did come easy and it sticks, caught like dry bread at the back of his throat. Instead, he rifles through the cassettes in the door card, fishing blindly and tossing aside misplaced contenders until he finds it, fingers closed around sweat-damp plastic. Start Static is abandoned, tossed from the car window to crunch under the tires. He shoves the replacement into the tape player and cranks up the volume.

As Oliver’s Army swells and fills the car with the gold-hued glow of Patrick’s summer day smile, Pete twists their fingers together across the gulf of the centre console and grins. For half a heart beat, it almost feels real.

~*~

Patrick is drunk.

Sloppy drunk. Leaning up into Pete like he needs him to stay upright drunk. Judging by the way he staggers off sideways when Pete experiments with the whole letting-go-of-the-back-of-his-belt thing, crashing into Joe with a giggle, Pete figures he probably does. Pete’s drunk too but not as drunk as Patrick, half-buzzed but still mostly in control of his gross motor functions as they trip towards Andy’s car.

“I’ll fuck you,” Patrick promises, eyes glazed and grin painted on, smeared like it’s still wet, sidewalk chalk washing away in summer rain storms as he hiccups, slurring and earnest. “I mean — I mean, _you_ can. Fuck _me_. I think I’d like it — like it better that way.”

There’s a reason Pete should say no. In fact, he’s pretty sure there’s a whole bunch of them loitering somewhere in his mental rolodex under a marker titled “Shit Not to Do.” But Pete’s brain is shitty at cross-referencing at the best of times and his internal index cards don’t seem to be in the right order.

“Do you wanna fuck me?” No one’s eyes should be that wide when they phrase that question, Pete decides, no one should bite their lip in quite that way unless… unless… “You should. It’ll be, like, _rad_.”

The index cards crash to the floor, scattered lengthways and sideways and skittering under furniture. Pete does not make any effort — specific or otherwise — to retrieve them.

“Didn’t need to hear that,” Andy singsongs from the sidewalk, straightedge, sober and judgemental with his car keys dangling from his fingertip. Pete’s mental rolodex thanks Andy profusely for the assistance. Pete’s cock does not. “Knock that shit off.”

“Does anyone, like, _need_ to hear anything?” Patrick philosophises from the road, framed in oncoming headlights with a hand braced to his hip and the other lodged under Pete’s shirt, fingernails digging into the small of Pete’s back. “I’m just _saying_ — ”

Whatever Patrick was _just saying_ is lost to the blast of a car horn and they hurrystaggertrip their way into the back of Andy’s Taurus. Patrick passes out almost immediately; pretty, limp, trashed boy draped over Pete on the back seat. Pete decides, drunker now he’s sitting down, that he’d like to invite Patrick to stay right there for as long as he needs to. Perhaps draft up a lease or a lifetime interest. He’s sure his dad can deal with the finer details.

Patrick drools on his shoulder, a wet puddle spreading out warm then cool then cold in the blast of ancient air conditioning. Every time he stirs, he digs his thumbnail into the dead centre of Pete’s not-quite-a-soulmark, slurring declarations of impending carnality.

Pete wants to do this. The reasons he shouldn’t (numerous, compelling, _important_ ) are rapidly redirecting — along with all oxygenated blood — from his brain to his penis. Pete’s penis is possibly a poorer decision maker than Pete himself.

When they get to Patrick’s apartment, Pete feigns sleep, fakes it like he’s passed out cold as Joe wrestles Patrick upright and bundles him into his building. He lies limp and unresisting because he _knows_ that if he gets into Patrick’s apartment — into his bed — he’s not going to be able to say no. No one tries to lift him, he’s deadweight and sprawling when Joe pulls at his arm, flopping fish-like across the bench as Patrick slides out from under him. Patrick has been saving himself and not for Pete. He _thinks_ it’s for Pete. But he is _wrong_.

“But no!” Patrick cries, lights flickering in interested windows as the denizens of the neighbourhood take a peek at the asshole slurring sexualised love sonnets on the sidewalk. They’re in Englewood. Patrick better hope no one decides to add to the murder statistics. “Pete! I need Pete to — to — you know! Fuck me!”

“Shh!” Joe splutters, even louder than Patrick, two drunken assholes arguing like they’re missing a Stooge. Pete would like to bet Joe’s red in the face, flushed close to burning under messy curls. “Shut the fuck up and get inside!”

“But!” Patrick shouts then drops his voice to a low roar he probably thinks is a whisper but is most likely audible in Michigan. “But ‘m a _virgin!_ He’s gonna — gonna take my, my gerinity. Virginery. My _innocence_. You know?”

Pete feels his lips twitch, unsure if he’s about to laugh or sob. There is a circle of Hell reserved especially for men like Pete, of that he has no doubt whatsoever. A particularly vicious one caught somewhere between lust and greed, with punishments Pete doesn’t want to think about too closely but it almost definitely involves brimstone and his cock. _That’s_ where people like Pete go. The ones that hurt people like Patrick.

“Inside!” Joe yelps. They tumble through the front door of the building, echoing declaration lost in dingy hallways.

The car is quiet, just the rise and fall of Pete’s breathing mixed with Andy’s and the tick-tock of the analogue clock on the dashboard.

“I know you’re awake,” Andy says, staring down the street at some distant stop sign. Pete stays very, very still, barely breathing, nose pushed down into upholstery that smells of every ass that’s ever sat on it. The car is at least twenty years old. That’s a lot of asses. “And I know what you’ve done.” Pete thinks he finds a patch that smells of Patrick’s sweaty jeans and breathes deeply. He is aware, without needing anyone to tell him so, that this is disgusting. “And I think you should tell him. I mean it, Pete. You need to tell him before someone else does.”

Pete wonders if this is how it feels to be hunted, some small and easily caught thing with the pack baying sharp on his heels. He keeps his eyes closed and his breathing steady and waits for the thump of Joe’s ass onto the seat up front. Streetlights wash the car from gold to black and back again, miles hummed out in the roll of rubber on asphalt as Pete considers his position.

It hasn’t gone unnoticed that Patrick’s never actually said _I love you_ in the two months since Pete scrawled his name in sharpie _._ It should be a given, a barely considered truth that trips from his lips without a pause. Which means one of two things — one: Patrick _doesn’t_ love him (puppy dog eyes and pleading smiles be damned) or two: Patrick _does_ love him but realises that something is off. Neither of those options strike Pete as particularly conducive to a long and happy lie life together.

They make an effort to drag him when they get to Joe’s place, rolling and cajoling him in irritating, unnecessary ways until he’s dumped onto Joe’s bedroom floor. Someone has the good grace to throw a blanket over him that smells suspiciously like old gym socks. A turn of his head and a nose full of fetid, teen boy stink informs him that he’s _lying_ on old gym socks. He sincerely hopes none of them have been used in Joe’s misadventures of masturbatory self abuse.

He closes his eyes and surrenders to whatever the Gods of alcohol consumption and poor life choices intend to hand out in the morning.

Pete does not sleep soundly, although Joe — piss drunk, head tipped back and a limb for every corner of the bed — snores with a sort of trainwreck peace about him. Pete can’t sleep because Pete is thinking. Thinking of them as _thoughts_ feel dangerous so he strips them back to _things_ instead and the thing is…

The thing is...

The thing is, Patrick wants Pete to fuck him.

And the thing is, Pete (kind of, sort of, _definitely_ ) wants that too.

But the thing is, Patrick doesn’t know the truth.

~*~

“One song.” Pete keeps it as a statement rather than a question, working on the dubious belief that he can force Patrick to comply by the sheer semantics of phonetics. “One song and I won’t bring it up again.”

“No songs.” Patrick shoves forward his counter offer with the same hand he raises his beer bottle — the very beer bottle he wouldn’t be holding if Pete hadn’t bought it for him (is gratitude too much to ask for?) “And I get back to enjoying my evening.”

Patrick’s lips are bitten raw, ragged edged and ridiculously pink, glazed with malt and hops as he lowers the bottle carefully to the table in front of him. Pete is barely forgiven for skipping out on Patrick and leaving him to wake alone in his apartment, hungover and with his virtue still intact. He’s aware — in a far from abstract way — that it can be effective to dig a fingernail into a wound and after all, it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.

“Hey,” he takes the rose-flushed curve of Patrick’s cheeks into his hands, feels the flame of hot blood beneath pale skin as he smacks a kiss to Patrick’s sweaty brow. Patrick twitches like the invasion of his personal space is deeply unwelcome, scowling under the brim of the beanie jammed over his hair. It has a soft little peak, enough to cast interesting shadows across his cheekbones. “Come on, babe. For me?” He brings his lips very close to Patrick’s ear and feels him tense, the quiver of an overstretched guitar string under his mouth, “I’ll make it worth your while later…”

That’s an unfair offer and Pete knows it, but as Patrick whines in the back of his throat and stomps his foot like an irritated nine-year-old, he suspects it might have been the _right_ offer.

“You shouldn’t bully him into it.” Pete raises an eyebrow — and his middle finger — at Paul over Patrick’s shoulder and, maintaining eye contact the whole time, grinds into Patrick just a little. “Don’t do it if you don’t want to, Patrick.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete says in a voice that betrays precisely how _not_ sorry he is right now. “Were you labouring under the entirely false premise that your opinion was required? What are you _doing_ here, anyway?”

“Pete.” Patrick says, in a tone that adds _be nice._

“Fine,” Pete rolls his eyes like it’s all he has to say on the matter, “So…?”

“How do I know,” Patrick begins loftily, like he isn’t lazily rocking half a hard-on against Pete’s thigh under the cover of the table, “that you won’t just have your friends roll me onto the carpet and leave me there to choke on my own tongue?”

“Because I never use the same moves twice,” Pete promises him on a hot breath straight into the shell of his ear. Patrick jerks like he’s been electrocuted, goosebumps prickling the back of his arms where Pete’s fingers meander a lazy trail. “Because seeing you up on that stage — just once — is gonna be like fucking foreplay. And, if we want to get technical about it, it was _your_ friend that left you on the floor. Anyway. What have you got to lose?”

“My dignity?” Patrick suggests, hands tucked into Pete’s back pockets as he breathes shuddering warmth over Pete’s collarbones. “My sense of self respect? The anonymity of dark corners? _No one hearing me sing_? All things I’m pretty happy with, all things considered.”

“Pete!” Chris calls from over by the stage. Pete waves an irritated hand in response. “Pete! _Now_!”

“It’s do or die, Patrick,” Pete grins electricity into the shine of Patrick’s eyes. Those lips — those indescribable, undeniably debauched lips — quirk into a smile that makes Pete think he might’ve won. “One song.”

“ _One_ song.” Patrick echoes, a single pale finger shoved to the dead centre of Pete’s chest in imputation. “One. At the end. When everyone’s too drunk to notice.”

There isn’t an inch of skin on Patrick’s whole body — even the large percentage of those inches that are buried under cotton and denim, Pete’s sure of it — that isn’t glowing pink and utterly kissable. Pete settles for kissing the tip of Patrick’s nose (also blushing) and rushes the stage before Charlie and AJ and whoever is hanging on tonight can choke themselves on obnoxious gagging noises.

He watches Patrick from behind his microphone, watches the way the kid _is_ music. It’s there in the way he moves to any beat without even thinking about it, bouncing from his knees to the rhythm of Chris’s bass and Andy’s drums. It’s there in the way he bobs his head in time, how he taps his hands to his thighs and how he — sensibly, like anyone with ears — still flinches a little at every note Pete butchers.

When he finally calls him up, when he stands in the blazing heat of stage lights that are probably three sets away from bursting into flames, when he watches the crowd part like the Red Sea for a tiny blond kid, all scuffed up Converse and shoulders rolled so far forward he’s in danger of disappearing into himself, he gets it. It’s taken two months — or sixty-one days, or one thousand, four hundred and sixteen hours, or enough seconds that Pete’s ability to _math_ is entirely exhausted — for him to understand but now he thinks he does.

Pete is obnoxiously, offensively, irritatingly in love with that selfsame tiny blond kid.

His cheeks hurt with it, each curve of his grin aching muscles from his jaw through to his temples as he lifts the bass from Chris and steps aside to make space on the stage as though there isn’t enough room for Pete, Patrick and the enormous gravitational field of _feelings_ he’s just been hit with. Pete isn’t sure there’s enough room for the three of them (Pete, Patrick and the aforementioned _feelings_ ) in the room, in the suburb, in the city or within a three state radius as he slings an arm around sweat-damp shoulders and leans into Patrick’s flushed-hot cheek.

“You sure?” he asks because he dimly recalls that consent is important. Patrick nods, lips tight, eyes wide as he struggles with his glasses for a moment before shoving them down into his pocket. “Alright,” he leans into the mic and drags Patrick with him, lips half-a-hair’s-breadth apart as the crowd resettles, realigns and prepares, “tonight, Chicago, for one night only — one fucking _song_ only — we’re gonna blow you the fuck away! Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Glenview, Illinois, _Patrick fucking Stumph_!”

They launch into _Start Today_ like they’ve actually practiced. Which they emphatically _have not_ . Particularly not with Patrick who looks like he’s going to pass out cold in the middle of the stage but not before he punches Pete in the dick on the way down. Fortunately, Patrick is the only one apparently capable of holding the whole shitshow together and by the time they hit the first chorus, Pete’s blinded. This sudden onset hysteria is caused half by unending adoration and a sneaking desire to escort Patrick to the nearest government office in which they might obtain a marriage licence, and half by the realisation that he, _Pete_ , is a fucking terrible musician in comparison.

Pete finds it considerably _less_ funny when the crowd grows restless towards the back of the room. It’s one of those slow shifts that starts with nervous energy and culminates in dull-dark shouting that builds like something in a Romero movie. Pete’s assigned half of his untapped Special Forces skills to checking for the living dead and the other half on figuring out an exit strategy to get Patrick out safely like he’s Duane Jones. Unfortunately, it’s not zombies that appear at the back of the venue. No, it’s far, far worse.

It’s cops.

Royal blue and badges and guns that are thankfully in holsters for the moment. The band trickles to a halt one at a time, Patrick fumbling into silence when he realises he’s — essentially — the last man standing. There’s that Red Sea parting down the centre of the crowd once more. They’re nervous now, restless, the underage ones — like the one he has on stage, full of liquor Pete has been buying for him — skittering away from the fringes and peeling out of the door.

“Good evening, officers.” Pete eases between Patrick and the microphone. There’s a syrup sweet grin on his face, the same smile that’s cleared him with his mom, his teachers _and_ his asshole neighbour when _someone_ sent a soccer ball sailing through a patio window. The cop isn’t smiling back. “Can I help you with something?”

“Peter Wentz?” the police officer at the front of the loosely formed triangle moves back the placket of his jacket to reveal an incredibly shiny badge and an equally shiny gun. (Pete remembers hearing in math or science or maybe on Mythbusters that triangles are, structurally speaking, the strongest shape. Pete has _no idea_ why he’s thinking this right now.) Pete nods, throat too dry to allow the passage of sensible words. “Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz?”

“The third,” he adds, helpfully. There’s a titter of expectant laughter from the crowd.

“I’m Detective Harvey. Could you step down here for a moment?” the officer asks, very reasonably.

“I’d really rather not,” Pete replies, very _un_ reasonably.

Detective Harvey climbs up onto the twelve-inch riser that Pete realises, belatedly, is woefully inadequate protection. He takes a step back. Patrick does not and yelps when Pete treads on his foot.

“Peter Wentz,” Detective Harvey begins, unhooking his handcuffs from his belt. Pete is prepared for several things — corrupting a minor (God knows how many of them are in the room), noise violations (though he suspects that’s the bar manager’s problem) or maybe some long-forgotten traffic infraction (probably as many of those are there are half-wasted under-21s currently present) the possibilities are endless, “I’m arresting you on suspicion of obtaining a fake soulmark.”

“Oh.” Pete was, categorically, _not_ expecting that. “I — ”

“You have the right to remain silent — ” his arms are shoved behind his back.

“Pete?” Patrick stoops in front of him, upside down and lopsided as he tugs at his arm.

“Anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law — ”

“No,” Patrick continues, pulling at the cop’s hands until he’s smacked away. “No, you don’t get it, this is just a mistake. He’s my — _my_ bond. Look!” He waves a wrist under the cop’s nose. Pete’s chest hurts, right the way up under his jaw and down into his stomach. “Pete! Fucking _say_ something!”

Pete wants to say something. He wants to say so many somethings that they threaten to choke him, to flood up and out of him until he washes the world away. They’re an impending meteor that will crush everything — crush _Patrick —_ if he doesn’t make it stop.

“You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, one will be appointed to you by the court — ”

“Pete?” It all seems to be falling into place for Patrick. The hidden mark for the first couple weeks, Pete’s hideous, inexcusable attitude problem, the looks, the half-heard conversations, fucking _Paul Lee Knowles-West_ (yeah, Pete looked him up, so fucking _sue_ him). “Pete, _please_.”

Patrick is pale-faced and trembling. A statue carved from every painful, burnt-edged decision that Pete has ever made leading up to this very moment. He would trade anything — _anything,_ every breath in his body and each beat of his worthless, bitter heart — to protect Patrick from what he’s just heard, what he _will_ hear and what he’ll think back on and realise.

“Do you understand the rights I’ve read to you?”

“Yes.” Pete hisses as the handcuffs bite into his wrists. He risks a glance at Patrick from under his bangs, the washed-white horror of him a knife to the ribs. “I’m sorry. I’m just — fuck, Patrick, I’m so fucking _sorry_.”

“Fuck you,” Patrick whispers, shellshocked. Pete understands perfectly. “Fuck _you_ ! You — you lying piece of fucking _shit_!”

Pete wants Patrick to punch him before he’s mauled away from the stage through a crowd of whispering accusations and Paul’s smug, jeering face as he rushes to Patrick’s side. Pete wants white-hot pain and copper rich blood smeared across his face like a brand so everyone can see and everyone can know what he’s done. Pete sees them, Paul’s arm draped over Patrick as he smudges away tears that Pete caused with thumbs that aren’t worthy to rest on Patrick’s skin.

“Patrick!” he roars, right before he’s hauled through the doors and into a waiting Chicago P.D. van. “I — I fucking _love_ you!”

It’s way too little, laughably late. The last thing he sees is Patrick turning into Paul’s chest, the wrap of too-long arms around his too-small back, hands stroking comfort over the shirt Patrick stole from Pete’s dresser that morning.

Patrick doesn’t spare him a glance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week will be the last chapter, friends.
> 
> Comments and kudos are lovely.
> 
> I'm also on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Pete is faced with the consequences of his actions...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Welcome to the end, I suppose. 
> 
> It's been a hell of a trip through the world of soul marks and the potential consequences that would appear therein and I really hope you think this is an appropriate ending. 
> 
> I won't waste any more time - on with the last chapter!

Pete has done some spectacularly stupid shit over the course of his twenty-four years on earth. He’s broken promises, hearts and bones — thankfully, the last one has only ever been his own — with the kind of alarming regularity that makes him start to wonder if it’s all his own fault. Pete has seen genuine, heartfelt fear in his mother’s eyes more times than he would care to recall, but nothing —  _ nothing at all _ — can come close to the look on Patrick’s face in the middle of a shitty basement club somewhere off Fullerton.

It haunts Pete like a spectre of everything truly shitty about himself, the freeze frame flashback of eyes like riptide widened in incomprehension, stiffening Pete’s spine in ever-expanding waves of self-loathing. He stares at the wall of the holding cell and drifts, counting cracks and holes and chips in the breezeblocks as he waits for questioning. Grubby, chipped-black nails find their way between his teeth, chewing and biting and worrying until the skin around each one is torn tender and bloodied. 

The cells are down in the basement; no natural light, nothing at all beyond the permanent-midday of yellowing bulbs glowing bright and unshaded above his head. No daylight means no sense of the passage of time — has he been here hours or days? weeks? months? does it really matter? — just the endless progression and rotation of drunks, brawlers and wife beaters. 

The man on the bench next to Pete is rhythmically slamming his head back against the wall, over and over and over. There’s a bare spot at his wrist that fills Pete with sticky-cold dread. Is this his future? He tucks his hood up over his head, curls his knees up against his chest and tries to feign sleep. 

This isn’t the first time Pete has been arrested — please note his earlier observation about poor life choices — but this is the first time he’s ever felt truly, totally alone. It’s also the first time that he’s craved his pills, those pesky little carefully dosed packages of self-control. Maybe he’s done with being crazy.

He doesn’t engage with the custody officer, doesn’t shout for water or phone calls or plead his case for freedom. He just  _ is _ . He sits, heels drawn together and tucked to his ass, knees wrapped in arms he pretends don’t tremble, and waits for whatever it is that’s coming.

Pete is convinced it will be absolutely no less than he deserves.

It always seems to pass that right as Pete believes he’s reached rock bottom, the universe conspires to kick him squarely in the teeth. Being kicked out of school turned out not quite as bad as boot camp turned out not quite as bad as crazy turned out not quite as bad as  _ blank _ . 

Despite this, Pete remains surprised (see also;  _ fearful, irritated, angry  _ and  _ humiliated  _ amongst other, appropriate adjectives) when his dad appears before he can be questioned. Pavlov provided proof that even  _ dogs _ learn to respond to stimulus in an appropriate way over time. Pete’s still waiting for that instinct to kick in. 

“What the hell did you do this time?” his dad asks, as though he hasn’t been fully debriefed prior to arrival.

“Arson, solicitation and I stole fucking Christmas,” Pete spits, far more aggressive than he has any right to be since he’s sort of depending on his dad and his DA connections to get him out of this mess. 

“Out,” his dad barks as the custody officer unlocks the cell. 

Pete has a grand plan. He’s been working on it for hours. In this plan, Pete stands in the middle of the cell and recites a heartfelt speech about throwing himself onto his sword for love and facing up to the realities of his actions. Because that’s what Patrick deserves. The plan slips away from him in the face of freedom and he hurries through the open door, shrugged down into his hoodie and scuffing his sneakers along the corridor as he follows his dad out of the station and into the waiting car. 

Again, Pete would like to reiterate that he is not a good man. Pete is as far from a good man as Patrick — or anyone — is likely to get and should be granted due caution. A storm warning. A raging set of blinking lights and screaming sirens that sound off around him each and every time someone is drawn into his magnetic field of fuck up.

They drive in silence — petulant on Pete’s part, furious on his dad’s — broken by nothing but the low hum of some late night talk radio station. The display of his phone informs him that he’s been an incarcerated criminal for a grand total of forty-six and a half hours. 

Good to know his dad was willing to let him sweat for the maximum length of time available to him by law in the state of Illinois.

“I knew letting you live alone was a bad idea,” his dad says eventually, fingertips drumming on the steering wheel and leaving tiny, cooling pockets of retracting perspiration against the leather. “Your mother said you could be trusted and — and I wanted her to be happy. I wanted  _ you _ to be happy.”

Pete’s stomach takes two steps to the right and immediately falls down an elevator shaft as the connotations of that statement become clear, “What do you mean?” His dad doesn’t answer but Pete has an awful, agonising,  _ terrible _ feeling that he knows where this is going. “Dad? What do you  _ mean _ ?”

“I mean that maybe it’s time you moved back home.” Pete likes that idea not at all. Too many eyes observing his mania, too many people crowding in on him, too many instructions to eat some dinner, take a shower, take his pills. 

“Did you bail me out?” he asks, to change the subject back to something his dad will no doubt be willing to pontificate on for the next two years. “When do I need to go back to court?”

There follows a tight, icy silence. The kind of silence that reminds Pete of frigid January air burning his lungs and freezing the inside of his nose.

“You don’t.” The reply is as unexpected is it is unwillingly delivered and Pete is struck by the sudden notion that his dad  _ wants _ him to go to jail for this. “I spoke to Judge Matthews this morning. They’re letting you off with a community penalty. The tattoo goes. At  _ your _ expense.”

Pete’s mouth proceeds to do what it does best; run at a speed his brain has trouble keeping up with: “Well, holy shit, I had no idea you were  _ that _ important — ” 

“I’m not,” his dad barks a laugh that sounds the opposite of amused, his fingernails sinking into leather and moulded plastic like he’s imagining doing the same to Pete’s neck. “That kid refused to press charges. Wouldn’t even give a statement.”

A spark of hope, the tiniest ember glow of a promised flame flares in Pete’s gut. If Patrick wouldn’t press charges that means Patrick doesn’t hate him. If Patrick doesn’t hate him, that means Pete  _ maybepossiblymight  _ have a chance at — at — 

“I need to call him,” he says, mouth-brain synchronisation jumping dissonantly out of time once more as he juggles for his dying cell phone. “You need to take me back,” words are nothing but syllables and syllables are nothing but sticky, coating Pete’s tongue like dissolving pills as he spits out garbled half-sounds and demi-thoughts, juggling sense and reason in a losing grudge match against need and want, “I need to talk to him, I — ”

“No!” his dad thumps the steering wheel, hard. Hard enough to make Pete jump, sliding back in his seat. “Do you have  _ any idea _ what you’ve done to that poor boy?” Pete’s heart is a haunted shell occupied only by the memory of Patrick’s face as realisation sweeps through him like storm waves. “Do you even comprehend what you’ve damn well  _ done _ ? I — this wasn’t supposed to happen, Peter.  _ This  _  is why I sent you to that godforsaken military school!  _ This —  _ ” and he stops to heave a breath, eyes fixed on the road as though it isn’t entirely deserted, “ —  _ this _ is why we have to treat you like a fucking  _ child _ at twenty-goddamn-four. You — you should’ve been at law school right now, instead you’re faking a soulmark like you don’t know it’s a felony. And the worst part? The thing that really stings? I’m not even disappointed in you anymore. I don’t expect any better from you.”

There is no part of Pete’s skin that doesn’t sting and throb with the unceasing, unrelenting force of parental shame. 

“Dad, I — ”

“Just  _ don’t _ ,” his dad cuts him off sharply. “Whatever it is you’re going to say, whoever it is you’re going to blame this time, just  _ don’t. _ That kid, Pete, that — that  _ kid. _ You’re disgusting.”

The childish bite of teenage rebellion burns the tip of his tongue, the  _ fuck you _ and the  _ you don’t even fucking know me _ , but Pete swallows it down, hot and bitter as bile because, for once, Pete is willing to accept that it’s true.

~*~

Summer fades. 

The city washes green to gold and life ticks on around Pete and his newly acquired relationship with his couch and a t-shirt Patrick left behind. It was already worn to death, black-faded-grey and holes wearing through at the collar, but it smells of warm skin and late afternoon kisses so Pete haunts his apartment tucked into the warmth of it. He’s missing a hoodie — cheap, black JC Penny’s basic, stained with letters Pete fixed on himself — and imagines it wrapped around Patrick as he’s wrapped around Paul.

It’s not a thought that he takes any pleasure in. 

He still plays his bass, still flits between whichever bands require him on an unending roster of  _ we’ll be the next big thing, I swear _ . He plays because the music is like a contagion, an airborne pathogen that infects the sadness and makes it bearable. He does it only because it fills the silence with static, because when he’s on stage he can scream his heartache over a congregation of kids that feel the same or are too apathetic to judge him. But mostly, he does it because it means he can pay his own rent. He’s grown to accept that he’s no one’s idol. 

Sometimes, he thinks he sees him; a flash of dirty blonde under a scruffy peaked beanie out amongst the crowd; the solar flare of stage lights on glass; the hunch of shoulders against the wall. It’s never him. Just some other awkward interloper, hovering at the fringes with a smile that isn’t right, eyes that aren’t the same and lips that don’t make sense. It’s like staring at a magic-eye puzzle all wrong; everyone else sees the carousel, Pete just gets a headache. 

So, summer fades, bleeds out like an arterial wound, and Pete does too, a day by day paling from technicolour vibrancy to monochrome. The days he doesn’t care about blur together, endless and monotonous, broken up by necessities like forcing himself to eat two handfuls of dry raisin bran straight from the box because he can’t bear the sound of his stomach growling.  He flavours it with hurling himself into the pit at another shitty show just so he can come out with the stinging pain of a black eye and a bust lip. 

“You love him,” says Chris one night, a pizza from Luciano's on the coffee table between them. Half of the pie —  _ Pete’s _ half — is untouched. Pete shrugs and picks at his fingernails because, really, what is there to say? “You should tell him.”

Pete thinks that might not be a bad idea and suggests it, all half-truths and hidden supposition, to Joe a few nights later, hidden under a blanket on his couch. 

“I don’t know, man,” Joe frowns, uncertain as he knocks back the last of his beer. Pete’s is still full, the label peeling away with condensation. “He’s pretty messed up, maybe you should leave him alone.”

Pete thinks that’s probably a better idea and talks it over with Andy two weeks after that, forced to a vegan restaurant across town to half-heartedly push five bean chilli around his bowl. 

“Maybe you should just give him time,” Andy suggests, scooping up a bite of chilli on an organic, fair trade, vegan-friendly tortilla chip. “Not do anything rash either way.”

In that particular moment, Andy’s word seems like gospel.

The problem, Pete tells his dead TV screen (because it’s talk to it or throw something through it since he can’t stand to get yet more well-intentioned advice from yet another friend anymore than he can stand the endless silence) is that no one seems to agree on what he should do. So instead, Pete does what he does best. He collapses into ennui and apathy like they’re the dirty sheets on his bed and allows the motions of living — of  _ existing _ — to grind on around him.  

Pete gets good at waiting for nothing, surprised it turns out to be a skill set all of its own, able to sit in silence and count the ticking of the clock without translating it into minutes, able to watch the cars rolling by outside without wondering where they’re going. But he still isn’t able to think about Patrick without it tearing an ache into his chest as he sits and watches the leaves flash from green to gold as summer slips away and takes him with it. Pete is a ghost, haunting the ravaged ruins of the castles he once saw in the clouds. 

When it happens, it’s like a cliché. A rattle of the door to his apartment on a night cloaked in the dark of a fall storm and lashing rain. 

(A night that Pete has spent in nothing but his underwear, watching Hallmark movies and eating Doritos until the dust stains his fingers orange.) 

He approaches his door — the source of three ominous and resounding crashes — with a fist pulled back and the profound wish that he was a baseball dude and not a soccer player. Soccer balls and shin pads make lousy weapons against anyone, but especially the creators of pounding, booming middle of the night door knocks. Pete, ever the poet, awaits the raven calling  _ nevermore.  _ He’s prepared for the monkey’s paw or the tell-tale heart.

Or maybe the drug dealer that visits the apartment downstairs.

What Pete is absolutely, definitely, profoundly  _ not _ expecting is Patrick. Soaked to the skin and creating a small lake of dripping rainwater on the tile, huddled into himself and into Pete’s hoodie ( _ love can’t save you —  _ something of a mantra to a man with no soulmark — currently peeling from too many runs through the dryer) as he bounces on his toes and blinks away the rivulets that run into his eyes. Pete isn’t sure what to do beyond lowering his fist, eyes wide enough to burn, jaw a little slack. He simply stares at his boy — his golden rosetta stone made flesh — standing shivering at his front door.

“I wasn’t expecting guests,” Pete whispers to the raindrop gathered at the tip of Patrick’s nose. “I — I would’ve worn pants. If I’d known. Sorry.”

“You gonna invite me in or what?” Patrick asks eventually after too many silent blinks, the words stuttered around chattering teeth that ignite Pete into action. 

He drags Patrick inside and slams the door behind him as though he’s worried he’ll run away. There is no  _ as though _ , he is entirely consumed by the belief that Patrick  _ will _ run away at the first given opportunity. He slides the lock into place just to buy himself a little more time when the inevitable happens. 

His tongue is thick and close to useless in his mouth as he leans back against the door and whispers, “Where have you…?” 

“I would’ve come sooner,” Patrick assures him, dripping puddles onto the living room floor. He inclines his head back towards the door with a shrug like it doesn’t matter. Pete hands him a dish towel without a word. “I was just, you know, waiting for suitable weather. This is definitely a middle-of-the-night-rainstorm kind of conversation.” 

It becomes apparent within moments that a thin, threadbare towel is entirely ineffective given that Patrick is soaked to the skin and shaking with down-to-the-bone cold. Pete immediately morphs into his mom as he fusses and clucks and drags Patrick out of wet clothes and into warm blankets, only briefly embarrassed that the entire contents of his wardrobe is currently draped across every available surface in his apartment. And none of it is clean. 

“I made some tea,” he says as Patrick huddles, small and pale, wrapped in Pete’s comforter as his teeth rattle and his hands shake. The teabag he found was dusty, no lemon in the fridge to accompany it. Patrick takes the cup, takes a sip and makes a small, appreciative noise. “What are you — ” Pete bites that off and starts again, “I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Honestly,” Patrick shrugs, glasses fogged and nose tipped red and wet, Pete is struggling to list reasons that he shouldn’t kiss him although he knows they are many, varied and entirely reasonable, “I thought I wasn’t either. What the fuck, Pete?”

“I can explain,” he’s not sure he can, but he’s willing to throw everything he has at trying, “I just — I’m a blank. And when I saw you had  _ my _ letters I just — I was out of my mind, I was drunk, I’d just — there was this girl and — and I swear I never meant to — ”

“You never meant what?” Patrick interrupts, hot with hurt and halfway back into his wet jeans before Pete can wrestle him back to the couch. Pete is half-crazed with fear, shadows chasing demons through the darkest parts of his mind as he loses himself to the reality of Patrick disappearing back into the rain. “You never meant to lie to me? You never meant to fake a fucking  _ soulmark _ ? You never meant you love me?”

“No!” He summons it up from somewhere, some deep recess of sense that makes him haul a breath and hold it —  _ one-two-three _ just like another night on the same couch with the same golden boy — to let it hiss from his lungs on a burst of too-little-too-late explanation. “Okay, maybe not to start! But then — fuck, Patrick, I fell for you and I didn’t even want to. I fell for you and now you’re all I can think about.  _ I fell for you  _ and now I’m broken without you and it’s like the bonds are wrong because I — I fucking  _ need _ you. I need you to sleep and eat and think and… and to keep putting one fucking foot in front of the other! I  _ love _ you. I meant that. I know you don’t owe me shit, you should fucking punch me in the face and walk away but — but, I think I need you to make me,  _ me _ . I’m not sure I like what I’ve been so far.”

Patrick doesn’t reply and, honestly, silence isn’t what Pete needs right now with his guts spilt and his heart hurting heavy in his chest. Patrick blinks at him in the silence and toys with the rim of his mug, thumb rolling back and forth as his throat works on words he’s not ready to share just yet. His voice is a rasp, low and dry and scraping against the walls as he shakes his head.

“You don’t need me,” he says, shaking his head, and Pete’s chest aches with how wrong Patrick is, “and I don’t need you. This soulmate thing is — it’s fucking  _ bullshit _ . Two halves of a whole like we’re — we’re broken without the other side? Like we’re a cracked vase or a — a fucking  _ jigsaw puzzle _ ? That’s fucked! I felt like a better me around you, but I’m still  _ me  _ without you, just like you’re still you and — and like Paul will still be Paul. Even without me.”

Pete’s head bounces up fast enough that his neck clicks and molten pain pools in his jaw, “Paul? Without you?”

Patrick slips the edge of the blanket around Pete’s shoulders with hesitant shyness, an offer of forgiveness staged in faded Star Wars bed linen, “You know what’s actually really boring? Having  _ everything _ in common. I want someone I can call out for their shitty taste in music.”

“So, you’re saying…?” Pete daren’t say it, convinced that if he does Patrick will laugh, he’ll snatch the hope away and leave Pete crushed and alone just how he deserves. “Please don’t fuck with me like this, I’m fragile — ”

Patrick leans forward and kisses him.

Pete kisses back. He kisses back like Patrick is the last breath of air in the room, like he needs to seize it from Patrick’s lungs and hoard it — safe as spoils — for his own. He kisses like he’s infected with a rare poison and the antidote is contained in Patrick’s tiny, gasping moans. He kisses with all tongue and very little else, sideburns crushed beneath his palms and fingers twisted in storm-soaked hair until they’re breathless and groaning, tumbled to the couch caught in too many clothes and a comforter snagged around their thighs as it trails to the floor.

“I want you to fuck me,” Patrick whispers as Pete abandons the plush press of those plump, flushed lips to kiss along the pale line of his jaw. “Oh God, I  _ need _ you to fuck me.”

That… escalated quickly. Pete pauses, eyebrows raised and lips still tucked to the throbbing point of Patrick’s pulse, each drop of blood in his own body deserting their posts to retake position in the throbbing ache of his cock. “Come again?”

“You heard me.” Pete  _ did _ , he’d just sort of like to hear it again to make sure he isn’t suffering from auditory hallucinations. “Fuck me.”

“Listen,” Pete’s mouth begins. His brain nods approvingly whilst his cock objects fiercely. “Maybe we should wait, I mean — ” Patrick rests a finger against his lips, an unspoken request for silence.

“I think,” Patrick whispers, flushed pink and pretty with his prick straining the front of his shorts (there’s a damp patch there that Pete longs to taste), “I think maybe you should stop making decisions for me. That… hasn’t exactly worked out well historically, has it?  Do you — Listen,” oh, Pete is listening, his attention only adequately described as  _ rapt _ , “do you think maybe we could make this work? Because if you do — if you  _ really _ do — then I want you to shut your fucking mouth and fuck me.”

Pete is forced to admit that Patrick has provided an adequately convincing argument but can’t resist another valiant attempt at self sabotage, “You can, like,  _ totally _ do ten thousand times better than me, you know that, right? You realise that?”

“Yes.” Patrick nods, deadpan, tugging his cock free from his shorts and beginning to stroke — his thick, swollen cock, the wet-sticky tip rubbed to the lines of Pete’s bartskull tattoo. The room begins to spin as the final loyal blood cells inhabiting his brain turn tail and rush to join their comrades in his crotch. “I am perfectly aware of that.” 

There is a segue from the couch to the bed — there  _ must  _ be — but Pete misses it entirely. The passage of carpet under bare feet, the discarded trail of bedsheets and boxer shorts is unworthy of his acknowledgement beyond the glowing, golden, electrified detail of  _ Patrick. _ Cream-pale vision made flesh scattered golden with coppered curls over flushed pink. Pete ducks his head as his knees thump to the mattress and seizes the rose-bloom flush of Patrick’s nipple between his teeth, lungs and head rushing with the resonant groan that echoes through the apartment like a song. 

He busies himself with practicalities; with condoms (yes  _ condoms _ , plural, because, like a pornographic boy scout, Pete believes it best to be prepared for any and all potential situations) and lube. He busies himself because if he looks, if he watches Patrick fold back onto the mattress like a feast of soft, pale skin and hard, swollen cock, then he’s not sure he’ll remember them in the aftermath. 

So, he turns, hands full like he’s offering Halloween candy — all treat, for his Trick — eyes shot sharp and full of Patrick. Patrick, with the cherry-flushed length of his prick in his hand. Patrick, with his knees tucked up and his feet pressed flat and every secret part of himself on display like he’s la chouette d’or.

Patrick, smirking a secret as his eyes flick between Pete’s hands and his face, “Are they… neon condoms?” Pete is going to drop down dead with a heart attack or faint in the next minute, he’s sure of it, his blood pressure yo-yoing with alarming speed as it fights between heating his face and stiffening his cock. “Nice. Classy.”

“There’s a Star Wars joke hidden in there somewhere,” Pete informs him casually, tucking the label of the lube against his palm so that Patrick can’t see it’s blueberry flavour. He suspects that probably won’t do much for his street cred as a suave, experienced lover. 

Patrick hums and arches his hips like he has no idea what he’s doing, as though he doesn’t notice the way Pete’s cock — hot and tight and throbbing with his pulse — jerks like Patrick is an electric current and Pete conducts every volt, “If you say you’re my father, I’m putting my pants back on.” The thought makes Pete want to tie him down — perhaps another time.

“Patrick,” Pete effects his very best Darth Vader impression, “I  _ am _ your daddy.” He times it with the wrap of his slippery palm — slick and scented synthetically sweet — around the velvet-veined length of Patrick’s stiff cock. He swallows the giggling groan that bubbles over the plush-plump, rosebud sweetness of Patrick’s lips, licking into his mouth as Patrick arches — desperate heat and mewling moans — straining to prolong the contact of Pete’s hand on his cock.

There is absolutely nothing dignified about the way Pete cries out around Patrick’s tongue, a noise torn from his chest that sounds like tripping onto the third rail as Patrick — wonderful, teasing,  _ perfect _ little Patrick — wraps a hot, damp hand around Pete’s hard, smooth cock. Pete’s heart is all out of sync, his breath scraping ragged and raw against the back of his throat as he ruts into the dry rasp of Patrick’s palm. Overstimulated, teetering on the brink of what could be an orgasm, could be an embolism, he leans to lick a trail of salt and sweat along the hollow of Patrick’s throat.

Goosebumps and delicate hair prickle in his wake, the brush of feet through long grass on meadow-fresh mornings. 

“Oh.” Pete gasps, just like Patrick on a night in a hallway, dirty linoleum under his knees and flickering bulbs bathing them grey and blue. “ _ Oh _ .” Sticky fingers find the ridge-and-bump of Patrick’s perineum, skirting skittering circles back over the tender tightness of his hole. 

“Oh.” Patrick echoes, hand tightening like agony around Pete’s cock as he stiffens. Pete is sure he’s teetering two good strokes from blowing his load straight across Patrick’s stomach. He rubs gently, coaxing moans from Patrick’s golden throat that slick up his insides like honey, tightness givinggivinggiving until the tip of one slippery finger slides inside. They pause, Pete’s nose tucked to Patrick’s ear, the smell of cheap shampoo chemically sharp. “Don’t stop,” he feels it more than hears it, morse code rumbled through the pale column of Patrick’s throat to vibrate dots and dashes against Pete’s lips, “don’t you dare fucking stop.”

Pete doesn’t stop, tight heat burning brands into his skin as he sinks into Patrick —  _ inside _ of  _ Patrick _ — one knuckle, two, down to the web of his fingers as Patrick shudders from toes to crown and back again, “How does that feel?”

“Like you have your finger in my ass,” Patrick snaps (breathy though, caramel-sticky with arousal) and clenches down, a delicious little yelp and eyes-crossed-shivering killing any further smart-assery as Pete brushes gently over his prostate. “Oh  _ fuck _ !”

There are too many hands between spread-wide thighs; pale and curled around the twitching, blood-dark length of Pete’s cock, one tanned and wrapped to the flush-pink gorge of Patrick’s and another thrusting a slippery finger into… into… Pete will think about it later, will just work around the tangle of hands and fingers and gently-bumping arms because if he thinks about it now… 

“Do you want another?” he asks, as soft as breathing, searching Patrick’s face for hesitance or reluctance. There’s nothing but want, desire and a touch of adorable concentration in the scrunched-nose-scrunched-brow, the nails of the hand not curled like a distraction around Pete’s cock sinking desperate little bruises into the gold of his shoulder. The low-drawn moan seems like a  _ yes _ so Pete presses inside, pushes deep and curls just right, feathering around the edges of that delicate little thrum tucked deep inside. Like he doesn’t know what he’s searching for. Like it’s accidental. “Good?” he asks, biting kisses along the curve of Patrick’s salt-stained collar bone. 

“ _ Nnnngh _ ,” Patrick gasps, thrusting down onto Pete’s fingers like he can drive him deeper, take him further, fuck himself exactly how he needs it. He seems to have abandoned any notion of stroking Pete’s cock, just squeezing with a rapid rhythm that matches the pulse that hums through Pete’s teeth. 

There are no words in Pete’s vocabulary to adequately describe the noise Patrick makes as he push-pull-teases at the swell of Patrick’s prostate. It hangs over them, wraps around them, tangled like the twist of handsarmslegs that sprawl across the stale sheets of Pete’s bed. Pete is half a heartbeat from losing his mind, one contraction of too-hot breath in too-tight lungs from abandoning hope all ye who enter here. 

“I fucking  _ love  _ you.” 

Patrick squeaks his declaration around a mouthful of Pete’s tongue, hand curved around the back of Pete’s neck as he pauses, wide-eyed and unsure, the tip of Pete’s third finger tight to his asshole. Once again, Pete remains convinced he must be imagining it, fingertip tracing around the stretched rim of Patrick’s hole as he stares at him with a lack of comprehension he can only hope is charming. “Uh — so, yeah. This is embarrassing and could you go back to — you know — whatever you’re doing down there?”

“I love you, too,” Pete tries — he tries  _ valiantly _ — to stop it there, to dam the tide of  _ inappropriate oversharing _ that backs up behind him. It’s futile. It’s coming out, whether he likes it or not. “I love you like I shouldn’t,” he slides the third finger inside and dies a little — a hot, fiery sort of death — as Patrick whimpers and flexes around him, “I love you like you’re all I’ll ever need. I love you because I  _ have _ to love you, because I was  _ made _ to love you. And if you want this,” he rubs his swollen cock along the crease of Patrick’s groin, the sticky tip grazing through red-gold hair set with diamonds of sweat and precome, “as much as I do, then I know you  _ do _ believe in that bullshit.”

“ _ Nnnngh _ ,” Patrick groans once more, thoroughly insensible. Pete is inclined to agree. 

He thrusts into the slick, grasping heat of Patrick, each rock of well-lubed fingers coupled with a stroke of his satin-smooth shaft, his thumb rolling on the weeping tip. He fucks into him, strokes him and — oh, God — kisses him until Patrick pulls away, damp-eyed and gasping. Pete glances down at the fuck-flushed curve of Patrick’s stiff cock. He’s almost entirely certain it should become a national landmark. 

“Please,” Patrick whispers, head rolled back to the pillow and hips rolled up to Pete’s hand. “Please, please,  _ please _ !”

Lips score the painted trails of sweat, misting pale skin in glittershine. Pete mouths at a stiff, peaked nipple, over ribs and hips and the soft swell of lightly-fuzzed belly, the flushed red tip of Patrick’s cock popped like a fucking cherry as he curls his tongue around the blood-hot cap of it. Lower and down across silk-sheathed shaft, over the copper-curled tuck of his balls, tongue lapping, lips sucking and then… Patrick whines, lip bitten and eyes squeezed tight as Pete slips away, removes his mouth, removes his fingers, groping blindly before glancing down with a grumble.

“‘Urple or ‘een?” Pete asks around a mouthful of foiled plastic, two of the ridiculous condom packets caught between his teeth. He spits them onto Patrick’s stomach with a grin that can only be described as wolfish. “Green is apple, if that helps?”

“Oh God,” Patrick snorts, dorky and irresistable, “those things are  _ flavoured _ , too?”

Sex, Pete is sure, is decidedly  _ better _ when it’s soundtracked by the golden flow of Patrick’s laughter. They roll the condom down the throbbing tightness of his cock together, four lube-slippery hands stroking, tugging, pulling until Pete’s thighs shake as much as the fucked-out stutter of his lungs. He presses him back, his Patrick — his beautiful, maddening,  _ flawless _ Patrick — sprawled out and trembling on sweat-stained sheets. 

“I love you,” he promises Patrick as he braces over him, weight all on his elbows and knees and foreheads touched so the honey and licorice of their hair can tangle. He remembers very little of his own first time, remembers nerves and sweat and blowing pretty much straight out of the gate. It was something that happened rather than something he cherishes. He wants more for Patrick and searches his eyes intently for any sign of trepidation or uncertainty. 

“Listen,” he begins. Patrick rolls his eyes; he’s clearly done with listening.

Patrick smiles — golden sweet and summer starlight — spreads his legs and hooks his thighs onto Pete’s hips, “Get inside me. Before I flip you over and fuck myself on your dumb  _ purple _ dick.”

“ _ That _ ,” Pete whispers, around a bite to Patrick’s salt-sharp earlobe, “has definite possibilities. We’ll  _ definitely _ be coming back to that. But right now,” he grasps his cock, lines up, circles the flushed crown against the nerve-blown twitch of Patrick’s hole, “you ready?”

There is a nod — Pete sees it — in the split second before Patrick pushes forward. The ivory gleam of his teeth snag and frame the petal pink plumpness of his thick lower lip as he drives his hips down onto the aching length of Pete’s cock. All Pete can do is watch, eyes wide and moans slurring thick from the tip of tongue as his cock breaches Patrick’s body. Pete is stuttering shivers like he’s freezing, sweating like he’s burning up with fever as Patrick, jaw set and eyes half-hazed and dreamy, impales himself down onto Pete’s prick until he’s flush, hips pressed to the peach-sweet curve of Patrick’s ass. 

“Oh.” They say together, fingers laced above Patrick’s head as they wait for it. 

Pete feels it when it happens, the press of Patrick’s heels insistent against the corded, cramp-tight muscle at the back of Pete’s thighs, the arch of his hips and the pleading moan. Pete is stardust and carbon, a big bang waiting to happen as Patrick clenches around him, bounces a little against the boxsprings and issues demands with his eyes, fucking down desperately onto Pete’s cock. This kid will be the death of him, Pete is sure of it.

Sweat stings his eyes and glazes their skin as he begins to rock his hips, cataloging each whine and whimper, each low-burnt moan that spills over Patrick’s lips to trip over his own. He swallows them down around the trace of his tongue to Patrick’s teeth, to his lips and palate and the tender, delicate flesh that lines his cheeks. The rose-tipped length of Patrick’s cock rubs up against Pete’s stomach, against the tattoo he’s kissed more times than Pete can count. Tattoo. His red-raw wrist rubs against Patrick’s, the bottomed-out sensation of his stomach crashing to the floor enough to knock him sick. 

Patrick knows.

At least, he follows the line of Pete’s gaze and hauls his hand down, crushes his lips to the delicate, vein-webbed map of Pete’s inner wrist and bites. He sinks his teeth into the gilt-gold stretch of it and sucks, his mark left in indentations of incisors and canines and the shadow of lips that are only — will  only — be matched by the shape of Patrick’s mouth. Pain sparks pleasure sparks sparkling, crystal sensation that tears a growl from Pete’s chest, nerves chasing blood cells through his system to twist him higher, faster, endless.

There is, somehow, both too much and not enough. Too much stimulation, too many nerve endings crawling with tingling, overpowering sensation and each of them rubbed, stroked and plundered by Patrick, by the way he squeezes around Pete’s dick, the way he bites kisses that taste of first love to Pete’s lips. Not enough air, not enough oxygen to hold and sustain them both as Pete sweats and shakes and waits for the inevitable tumble over the precipice. Pete will die on this bed, inside this Patrick —  _ his Patrick _ — and he will die eminently and entirely happy. 

“Please,” Patrick murmurs again, like it’s the only word his lips remember how to shape, shoving Pete’s bitten-raw wrist down between their bodies to close his fist around the wet, red length of his cock. “Please!”

Fuck and jerk and bite and kiss. Pete is no more than instincts wrapped in tattoos and cheap cologne as he ruts his hips into the tight heat of Patrick. Each inch of him, each scrape of hot, tight  _ him _ against the friction burn sting of Pete’s skin is another pull closer, another tip of the scales towards explosion and ending and  _ nothing _ . Foreheads, noses, lips, chests, hips; there is no inch of them that does not touch, no stretch of sweat damp skin that isn’t rubbed as Pete shifts closer, ever closer, circling the edge of the spiral waiting to take him down. 

“Gonna come,” Patrick whines, and Pete’s cock twitches in response, “Gonna — gonna come!”

And Pete falls apart.

The sum total of each of his parts reduced to nothing more than singing sensation and blood-bright sweat. He is nothing but the hands on his hips, the lips on his throat and the pulsing, aching heat in his prick. He is falling, endlessly falling, through everything and all that has come before and all that may yet be. He is writing poetry in starlight and singing love songs in the way moonlight glitters on Lake Michigan. He is complete and he is broken and he is absolutely, irrefutably  _ Patrick’s. _

So, he strokes and he kisses — wet and messy, all tongue and very little coordination — and  he hauls Patrick along with him with a hand around his cock and sharp thrusts of his fucked-raw, softening prick.

“Pete,” Patrick whispers, face tucked to the crook of his neck and words whispered like promises in his ear, the soundtrack to the rippling shockwaves of relenting release, “Oh, Pete.”

When Patrick falls apart, it’s like an implosion. Come and heat and grasping nails sunk into hips as Pete strokes him through it. He comes with Pete’s name on his lips like a stain, with the flood that slicks between their stomachs. He collapses, sated and sticky, cat-like and loose and utterly, thoroughly fucked. 

It looks good on him.

~*~

It’s a wonderful daydream that Patrick has woven around them. Wrapped in it like comfort blankets, Pete spends hour after blissful hour exploring, painting Patrick’s skin with his tongue, mapping each inch of him until they’re streaked in a masterpiece of sweat and come. They roll together until exhaustion demands her pound of flesh and they sleep, tangled in one another.

~*~

Pete wakes nauseated and with Patrick pinning his arm — his unmarked, unwanted,  _ blank _ arm — to the mattress. The bruises Patrick bit to him are bloomed purple, black, green and exquisitely painful but not quite enough. Not real. 

“Hey,” Patrick blinks from the pillow as Pete swallows down panic rising like high tide storm waves, “good morning.”

Anxiety be damned, Pete won’t ruin this. He refuses to taint the night before with his crippling inability to deal with the morning after. He can’t expect Patrick to shoulder the weight of his crazy — pill bottle untouched for months in the bathroom cabinet — as the steady patter of rain against the windowpane seeks to remind him that summer has gone. He won’t breathe a word, he swears it and yet, they twist out in tangle of bitter vowels and consonants creeping up like bile.

“I’ll fuck this up,” he assures Patrick as blue eyes blink away grit and confusion into the grind of a palm. “I’ll fuck this up and I’ll take you down with me. Do you know what they’ll say about you? You can’t be with a  _ blank _ , you have a mark…”

Patrick doesn’t say a word. Patrick has always been better at controlling the noise, at taking the static that hisses like unending sibilants at the edges of Pete’s psyche until he can barely breathe. He’s the translator, the oracle and the anchor that makes it all make sense. Patrick roots through Pete’s nightstand until he emerges with a pen — a pink glitter pen that Pete would like to blame on an ex but can’t.

“You’re an idiot,” Patrick informs him, taking his hand, looping and rolling the nib of the pen over Pete’s wrist — his  _ blank _ wrist. “When I met you, I thought you were way too good for me, you know?” Pete stares at the mattress in miserable silence, each agonising memory of it caught in the swirl of the dust motes that dance around them, “Then I realised you’re a bigger dork than I am, that you dance in your underwear when you think no one’s watching, that you listen to fucking  _ Christina  —  _ ”

“Hey, Christina  is a goddamn goddess — ”

“And I realised I’d fallen in love with you.” The pen digs fractionally harder into the line of Pete’s artery as their eyes meet. Patrick’s lips quirk into a smile as he finishes with a flourish — oh, beautiful sunlight Patrick, golden and bone-deep warmth. Pete glances down, his heart throbbing pulped and painful and threatening to bruise his ribs from the inside.

_ If I woke up next to you _ .

It loops and scrawls across Pete’s skin in ink that smells of candy canes, filling the blank with a burst of colour and adoration, washable so no one can condemn him for it. Tears sting his eyes and his throat as he chokes on his attempt to swallow away the salt-bright burn of them. He winds the pale length of Patrick’s fingers with his and wonders how so many shitty decisions could possibly have paid off so well. It’s the kind of paradox mathematicians might study one day. Pete is the blank equivalent of a damn lottery winner. That didn’t buy a ticket. 

“I love you, too,” Pete says, voice raw and strange as he watches the ink dry. 

There is a lifetime ahead of them. A patchwork tapestry of poor choices that Pete is fated to make, his ability to fuck up no doubt written in the stars, of the highs contained in the curve of Patrick’s smile and the lows in the reality of Pete’s inferiority. Pete is prepared, his course far from plotted but his helm pointed at the horizon as he sets his sails against the wind. 

“I’ll write you a new one every day, I swear it.” Patrick smiles, bright and golden enough to haul the summer back around them, a taste of warmth and sticky, Midwest nights to come. “I promise, I’ll always make you make sense.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, I hope you've enjoyed it. I guess the moral here is that life is rarely perfect, even when certain aspects of it are supposed to be dead certs. 
> 
> Panda, you didn't trust me. You thought I'd write something awful. You HATED me, Pete and Paul (in that order), I hope I'm forgiven?
> 
> Comments and kudos would be awesome and, if you like, you can find me on Tumblr @sn1tchesandtalkers

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Just a Painter and I'm Drawing a Blank](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15361386) by [Flames_and_Jade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flames_and_Jade/pseuds/Flames_and_Jade)




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